The Canon Club: Anton Bruckner

The Canon Club

Anton Bruckner was born in 1824 in Ansfelden near Linz in Upper Austria, the eldest of eleven children born to a schoolmaster. He became a teacher then was appointed an organist, eventually moving to Vienna. Bruckner was a late developer as a composer, lacking confidence in his abilities. After various early efforts including two preparatory symphonies he wrote nine fully recognised symphonies, three sacred masses, a Te Deum and motets. Although often mocked as a country bumpkin, he came by the end of his life to be recognised as one of the era's great orchestral composers. He died in 1896.

Dr. Bryan Gilliam is an emeritus professor of Duke University and an authority on the music of Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss among others.

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The Canon Club is a show about the Western canon: the great cultural inheritance we're handed, across music, art, and literature.

It was born of a blog by Ed West, in which he pined for a return to the schools of art and literary appreciation that were so famous in pre-WWI Vienna.

An era when people took seriously their commitment to appreciating the art that had come before them: from Beowulf to The Divine Comedy, from Goya to Beethoven, from Brahms to Ibsen.

This podcast is that latter-day Viennese salon.

The Western canon is everyone's birthright, even if most of us feel under-educated in it. Paul and Ed have set out to reclaim it for themselves, and thereby transmit it to a wider audience.

Ed West is a prominent British journalist, and the author of the wildly popular Wrong Side of History Substack.

Paul Morland is a nationally-renowned expert in demographics, and the author of several books.

In Season One, they'll be inducting one person or movement per episode into The Canon:

E01: Caravaggio with Andrew Graham Dixon

E02: Macbeth with Neema Parvini

E03: Anton Bruckner with Bryan Gilliam

E04: Anna Karenina with Rosamund Bartlett

E05: The Romanesque with John McNeill

E06: Thomas Mann with Tobias Boes

E07: Van Gogh with Martin Gayford