Posted on 11/19/2005 1:41:24 PM PST by blam
You're right. I love his music, but being in the presence of his bone fragments just doesn't do it for me. Sorry I can't get more excited.
Outlandish stories about Bruckner went the rounds in Vienna, many of them true. Part of what Brahms and others could never quite get over was that Bruckner the composer of epic symphonies behaved, much of the time, like a nincompoop. There were, for instance, the incidents regarding the Beethoven and Schubert remains. Both composers were exhumed in 1888 for reburial in "Graves of Honor" in Vienna's Central Cemetery. Before reburial the coffins were opened for the inspection of doctors and scientists. Bruckner, then sixty-four, showed up uninvited on both occasions. When he saw Beethoven's open casket, he shoved past the horrified doctors and seized the skull in both his hands,staring into the empty sockets as if he were trying to divine the sublime riddle of genius, and declaimed in his Upper Austrian drawl,"Now ain't it true, dear Beethoven, that if you were alive today you'd allow me to touch you? And now them strange gentlemen here want to forbid me that!" He had to be forcibly removed. Beethoven's bones may be decorated to this day by a lens from Bruckner's spectacles, which fell out during the ruckus. He pulled the same stunt at Schubert's exhumation, refusing to release the skull until they allowed him to place it in the coffin himself.
Just don't ask me what "Upper Austrian drawl" for "ain't" was.
Sorry, I should have pinged you too.
what an oddball! interesting story,argh, thanks!
Some German dialects may use 'net' instead of Nicht Wahr (Isn't it True) at the end of a phrase to make it a question.
e.g. The Pfälzisch Schää Heit, net? (High German: Schön Heute, Nicht Wahr?), meaning Nice today, isn't it?
The 'net' could probably be construed as the American "ain't".
I think Pennsylvania Dutch, which is close to Pfälzisch, uses net and translates it to "ain't" in English.
An interesting question.
longjack
And these skull fragments just baroque off while the good doctor was doing his work?
HAH!! No, I suspect some ham-fisted mahler snapped them off.
Bump for later.
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