Obsession

Donald Macleod explores five personality traits of Anton Bruckner, one of the strangest geniuses in music. Today, obsession – from bar-counting to full-blown ‘numeromania’.

It’s not unusual for a composer to be preoccupied with questions of balance and symmetry, but Bruckner took it to extremes, punctiliously numbering the bars in his pieces to make sure the proportions were arithmetically ‘correct’. At moments of stress, this habit of orderliness went into overdrive, leading him to go on counting marathons – anything from grains of sand to stars in the sky. Not long after the completion of his 1st Symphony, Bruckner’s escalating stress levels brought on a complete nervous breakdown, which landed him in a sanatorium for three months. Here he was diagnosed with numeromania, which would now probably be recognised as a form of OCD. A very different kind of obsession was with members of the opposite sex – generally ones whose ages could be represented by relatively small numbers. In his diaries, Bruckner kept a list of all the girls who had caught his eye, almost all of them teenagers. He proposed to several, always with the same result: rejection.

Bruckner: Locus iste, WAB23
Polyphony
Stephen Layton, conductor

Bruckner: Symphony No 1 in C minor (1877 version, ed. Haas)
(1st mvt, Allegro molto moderato)
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Bernard Haitink, conductor

Bruckner: Mass No 3 in F minor, WAB 28 (Kyrie)
Ingela Bohlin, soprano
Ingeborg Danz, contralto
Hans Jörg Mammel, tenor
Alfred Reiter, baritone
RIAS Chamber Choir
Orchestre des Champs-Elysées
Philippe Herreweghe, conductor

Bruckner: Symphony No 5 in B flat, WAB105 (3rd mvt, Scherzo: Molto vivace – Trio)
Staatskapelle Dresden
Giuseppe Sinopoli, conductor

Bruckner: Germanenzug (The Germanic Host), WAB 70
Brian Clickner and Jack Richardson, tenors
Jeffrey Stell, baritone
Allan Mosher, bass
Roberts Wesleyan College Chorale and Brass Ensemble
Robert Shewan, conductor

Produced by Chris Barstow for BBC Wales