It was spring 1987 at Clark University, and music was in the air.

Lambsbread, a Vermont-based reggae band, played at Spree Day. Top hits like The Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian” and U2’s “With or Without You” wafted from the radio. And Benjamin Korstvedt, a onetime blues-loving, guitar-playing Deadhead who had expanded his purview to include the piano and canonical classical composers like Bach and Beethoven, graduated from Clark, summa cum laude, with a B.A. in music. With no immediate plan, he took a nondescript nine-to-five job.

One day while flipping through albums in the 99-cent bin at a local record store, Korstvedt uncovered the symphonies of 19th-century Austrian composer Anton Bruckner. Intrigued by a composer he had hardly encountered during his undergraduate years, Korstvedt bought the albums, took them home, and listened.

“I was captivated,” he recalls. “It struck me immediately as fascinating music, with so many innovative aspects, but also intensely expressive and dramatic.”

Story from Clark University Magazine, fall 2024

Little did he know his chance encounter would ignite such an enduring passion for the music that one day Korstvedt would become one of the world’s foremost authorities on Bruckner—a modern-day muse for the composer’s long-overlooked genius and impact.

A Bruckner Year

Nearly four decades since his discovery in that dusty record store bin—after researching Bruckner’s complex works and complicated history while studying for his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania and after joining Clark’s faculty in 2002—Korstvedt is having his most extraordinary Bruckner experience yet. The Jeppson Professor of Music has been called upon to share his expertise during Austria’s “Bruckner Year,” which celebrates the 200th anniversary of the composer’s birth on September 4, 1824, in a village near the city of Linz.

Korstvedt, president of the Bruckner Society of America since 2011, has been on sabbatical to conduct research and participate in various events throughout Austria.

In the spring, he delivered the keynote address for an international conference in Vienna sponsored by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and curated an exhibition and presented lectures as part of Austria’s Steinbach Mahler Festival. He spoke in Linz at the Bruckner University for Music and the Performing Arts about the composer’s Fourth Symphony and chaired the organizing committee for an international conference held at the “Bruckner Days” festival in St. Florian, Austria, where Brucker was a choir boy and later organist at St. Florian Abbey. In Britain, he presented the keynote address for the Institute of Austrian and German Music Research’s Fourth International Conference.

This fall in Vienna, New York, and Washington, Korstvedt is delving into the archives to research the musical and personal relationship between Bruckner and his younger composer friend Gustav Mahler for a future publication.

Changing Images of Bruckner

Over the years, depictions of Bruckner have been marked by dissonance, much like a discordant symphony. The composer has been seen as a misunderstood genius, a Catholic mystic, even a dangerous musical radical, according to Korstvedt. Austria’s 19th-century cultured elite generally regarded him as a “bumbling, rustic character from out in the provinces who was not very sophisticated.”

Throughout his life, Bruckner struggled to secure performances of his symphonies. But by the 1920s Jazz Age, during a period of rapid social and cultural change—and just two decades after his death in 1896—Bruckner had become embraced as one of the most avant-garde composers of the symphony, Korstvedt notes.

“Every characterization of Bruckner emerges in a specific time and place—and is always shaped by the cultural tendencies and sociopolitical pressure of the moment,” he explains.

Egregiously, Bruckner’s image also was molded, exploited, and tarnished in the 1930s with the rise of Adolf Hitler, who also had been born in Linz near the German border. Hitler claimed the composer as a fellow German, symbolically annexing him just as he would soon politically and militarily annex the nation of Austria.

“BRUCKNER TAKES THE LISTENER ON A GREAT JOURNEY THROUGH ALL SORTS OF DIFFERENT EMOTIONS AND CONFLICTS.”

“Bruckner was heavily appropriated as a symbol not only of German art and music but also of the supposed unity of Germany and Austria,” Korstvedt says. “Hitler took a great interest in Bruckner’s music, and Bruckner became used as a symbol of German nationalism.” In a 1937 ceremony at the Walhalla temple, Germany’s “hall of fame” in the Bavarian city of Regensburg, Hitler celebrated the installation of his commissioned sculpture of the composer.

Critical fallout against Bruckner lasted until the 1950s and ’60s, according to Korstvedt, when the popularity of high-fidelity audio and LP recordings brought new appreciation for the intense symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler.

“Their music was, and is, a favorite of people who are audiophiles. It’s good music to enjoy in stereo,” says Korstvedt, whose authoritative notes accompany Bruckner from the Archives, a six-double-CD-volume series celebrating the 200th anniversary of Bruckner’s birth.

‘The Bruckner Problem’

In October, Oxford University will publish Korstvedt’s third book, Bruckner’s Fourth: The Biography of a Symphony. It’s the culmination of his research into a musical work that perhaps best defines what scholars call “the Bruckner Problem.”

For years, musicologists have disputed the authenticity of various versions of Bruckner’s works, especially his Fourth Symphony. During his lifetime, most of his symphonies were published with his approval, but in the 1930s scholars advanced the argument that these publications had been heavily edited by Bruckner’s friends and students supposedly without the composer’s approval or even awareness, according to Korstvedt. As a result, modern editors decided to publish only the “original” versions of his symphonies, even though many of these had not been published during the composer’s lifetime.

Deep into his doctoral research, Korstvedt became aware of “striking contradictions” in the historical evidence pertaining to Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony. The version of the Fourth published during Bruckner’s lifetime, Korstvedt says, “was commonly believed to have been ‘mutilated’ by editors and possibly even produced without his awareness or agreement.”

This interpretation first emerged within Nazi Germany, which added to Korstvedt’s suspicions. “The more I delved into it, the clearer it became to me that a lot of the scholarly work was strongly shaped by the ideological context” of Nazi Germany, and he began to see that “the facts told a much different story.”

Immersed in unraveling the mysteries surrounding the Fourth, Korstvedt traveled to Austria in 1993 to examine photographs of a crucial but long-overlooked document from the symphony’s compositional process: a copy of the score prepared by Ferdinand Löwe, a former student of Bruckner’s who later became a leading conductor.

That score has a fraught history. It was made available to a sympathetic scholar in 1940. But because Löwe and his family were identified by the Nazis as half-Jewish, the issue quickly became a cause célèbre that threatened to disrupt the official narrative of Bruckner as victim of unscrupulous editors. Given the great political investment in Bruckner’s music at that time and place, the scholarly debate was quickly silenced. After the war, the manuscript was returned to the Löwe family, but today its whereabouts remain unknown.

Korstvedt’s research convinced him that this version of the Fourth was not a corruption of Bruckner’s wishes but rather a clear expression of his final intentions. It reveals that “Bruckner had worked over the score closely and made many of the most important changes. He was totally involved in the process.”

Korstvedt’s revelation made waves among other Bruckner scholars. “There was quite a bit of resistance to it,” he recalls, “and this persists in some circles.”

Editing an Award-Winning Fourth Symphony

Korstvedt’s argument did win over a key player: the managing editor of the Bruckner Collected Works, the late Herbert Vogg. He asked Korstvedt to prepare a new critical edition of this version of the Fourth Symphony. Korstvedt’s new edition of the Fourth, which has been performed across the world, fostered fresh insights into the composer’s musical thinking and creative process.

In a nod to Korstvedt’s contributions, The New York Times described Bruckner’s Fourth as “something of a work in progress” because of edits and tweaks by “followers, publishers and scholars. … The burden is on musicologists and conductors to decide which iteration is the most authentic, or just the best.”

More recently, Korstvedt collaborated on a major recording project with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra and its conductor Jakub Hrůša that won the 2022 International Classical Music Awards’ Best Symphonic Recording category. The four-disc recording features three versions of Bruckner’s Fourth, all in new editions edited by Korstvedt, who also wrote the accompanying essay.

The Fourth’s complicated history may most intrigue Korstvedt, but for him Bruckner’s greatest symphony is the Eighth, the subject of his first book, Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 8, published by Cambridge University Press in 2000. “The Eighth plunges into some very great emotional depths,” he observes, “and the overall sweep of that symphony takes the listener on a great journey through all sorts of different emotions and conflicts to a very compelling resolution.”

In similar fashion, Korstvedt’s great journey through Austria for Bruckner Year is winding down. Much like Bruckner’s Eighth—which ends, Korstvedt says, with a “remarkably calming coda after the intense turbulence that preceded it”—the music professor will take a much-needed pause before returning to campus in January. ▣