Anton Bruckner - Symphony no. 8 "Apocalyptic"

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It's not often that the terms "Great Composer" and "humble" are joined, but the great Austrian composer Anton Bruckner did.  Unlike predecessors Beethoven or contemporaries like Richard Wagner, he was perhaps humble to a fault.

While writing glorious music.

In a sense, he was a provincial boy who found himself unexpectedly in the capitol of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and even decorated with the Order of Franz Joseph by the Emperor himself.

Perhaps it was his awkwardness that kept all this from going to his head.  Never married, he kept proposing to (and being rejected by) teenage girls.  While verging on scandal at the time, there's nothing suggesting that he ever did more than plight his troth in vain.  His strange misunderstanding of basic relationships was captured in the story of one of his conductors who, after a particularly successful concert was approached by a beaming Bruckner who pressed a thaler coin into his hand to drink a beer to Bruckner's health.  The conductor wore the coin on his watch chain ever afterwards.

His student Gustav Mahler said that he was "half simpleton, half God".  Because he gave us music like this.



Half simpleton, half God.  I could be satisfied with an epitaph like that myself.