On this day in the year 1886, critic Gustav Dompke wrote these lines in the “German Times” of Vienna, after attending a performance of one of Anton Bruckner’s symphonies:

“We recoil in horror before this rotting odor which rushes into our nostrils from the disharmonies of this putrefactive counterpoint... Bruckner composes like a drunkard!”

Today, with Bruckner’s symphonies performed and recorded so often, I don’t think many “recoil in horror” from his rich Romantic harmonies… but he’s always been controversial. Bruckner’s European contemporaries and his early American audiences found his approach to symphonic composition puzzling, bizarre, or, more often than not, simply boring.

The vogue for Bruckner symphonies in America had to wait until the latter part of the 20th century, a full century after many of them received their premiere performances in Europe. In 1941, for example, when Bruno Walter conducted Bruckner’s giant Eighth Symphony at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic, music critic Olin Downes lamented that Walter hadn’t chosen a “more interesting” program, and noted that the Bruckner symphony: “sent a number from the hall before it had finished.”