Anton Bruckner

"They want me to write differently. Certainly I could, but I must not. God has chosen me from thousands and given me, of all people, this talent. It is to Him that I must give account. How then would I stand there before Almighty God, if I followed the others and not Him?"

"Anton Bruckner’s reputation rests almost entirely with his symphonies – the symphonies, someone said, that Wagner never wrote."

"We recoil in horror before this rotting odour which rushes into our nostrils from the disharmonies of this putrefactive counterpoint. His imagination is so incurably sick and warped that anything like regularity in chord progressions and period structure simply do not exist for him. Bruckner composes like a drunkard!"

"Half genius, half simpleton."

"Über Bruckner kann ich gar nicht mehr reden, weil mir jedes Wort fehlt, um zu sagen, für wie groß und erhaben ich diese Kunst halte."

"Daß es Bruckner gegeben hat, ist für mich das größte Geschenk Gottes."