Composers Matched with their Comments

1. Johannes Brahms: "Everything has its limits. Bruckner lies beyond them...."
   
   
2. Gustav Mahler: "You are carried away by... his inventiveness, but... repeatedly disturbed by its fragmentary character...."
   
   
3. Jean Sibelius described Bruckner as "the greatest living composer."
   
   
4. Johann Strauss sent the telegram.
   
   
5. Igor Stravinsky: "The Adagio of the Ninth Symphony must be accounted one of the most truly inspired of all works in symphonic form."

Here are the sources:

1. Letter from Brahms to Elisabet von Herzogenberg, 12 January 1885. Styra Avins, Johannes Brahms: Life and Letters, page 619 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001).

2. A conversation between Mahler and his brother Otto in 1893. Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, translated by Dika Newlin, as quoted in Crawford Howie, Anton Bruckner - A Documentary Biography, page 326 (Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, 2002).

3. Crawford Howie, Anton Bruckner - A Documentary Biography, page 606 (Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, 2002). Howie describes a letter from Sibelius to his fiancee, Aino Jarnefelt, 21 December 1890.

4. Crawford Howie, Anton Bruckner - A Documentary Biography, page 507 (Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, 2002).

5. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (London, 1981) as quoted in Peter Palmer, "Ludwig Wittgenstein's Comments on Bruckner" in Crawford Howie, Paul Hawkshaw, and Timothy Jackson (editors), Perspectives on Anton Bruckner, page 362 (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2001).

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