
Benjamin Korstvedt rewrites the record on Austrian composer Anton Bruckner.
By Nate Chinen
Benjamin Korstvedt Gr’95 was peering into the glowing screen of a microfilm reader at Van Pelt Library, some 30 years ago, when he had a jolt of insight. Researching Anton Bruckner for his doctoral dissertation, he had come across a set of unidentified annotations in the Austrian composer’s cursive scrawl. Previous scholars had brushed these notes off as irrelevant. All at once, Korstvedt knew otherwise—that they were a key to Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, the focus of his academic work.
“I realized that they were actually a listing of the revisions he had made to the final version of the symphony after its first performance,” Korstvedt recently recalled. “They corresponded to the pages of the manuscript that I had been studying in Vienna. And it was like a penny dropped.” Walking back to his off-campus apartment, he ran into a fellow music student in the courtyard. “I remember saying to him: ‘I just figured it out!’ The pieces suddenly fell into place, in a way that was undeniably correct.”
Korstvedt’s aha moment sparked a cycle of inquiry, discovery, and argument that has established him as quite possibly the world’s foremost scholarly authority on Bruckner’s music. He’s certainly the preeminent steward of the composer’s magnificent Symphony No. 4, having published the first modern edition of its third and final 1888 iteration, and having collaborated with the Bamberg Symphony on an award-winning 4-CD set of all three canonical versions. He is president of the Bruckner Society of America and sits on the editorial board of the New Anton Bruckner Complete Edition. When we first spoke in June, Korstvedt was about to travel to Upper Austria for a Bruckner symposium, where he presented on “Varieties of Sublime Experience in Bruckner’s Late Adagios.”

By Benjamin Korstvedt Gr’95
Oxford University Press, 360 pages, $132
Several months later—in November, toward the close of Bruckner’s bicentennial year—Korstvedt’s expertise culminated in the publication of Bruckner’s Fourth: The Biography of a Symphony, which deftly combines musical analysis with cultural theory and historiography, focusing on its subject with a tenacious precision. It’s an exemplary piece of music scholarship that one fellow Bruckner expert, the German musicologist Felix Diergarten, has hailed as “a magnum opus.”
For all of Bruckner’s popularity among symphonic conductors and subscription audiences—a factor that led the New York Times to recently declare that “we live in the Bruckner Moment”—he’s a complex figure to unpack, because of an array of apparent irresolutions in his life and work. One 19th-century contemporary, the German conductor and composer Hans von Bülow, notoriously described him as “halb Genie, halb Trottel”—half genius, half dope (or klutz, or oaf)—capturing a prevailing sentiment among Vienna’s musical elite at the time. By all accounts, Bruckner was a devout Catholic with an earnest demeanor and work ethic, which led many to characterize him as a provincial naïf. The revisions he made to his symphonies, resulting in multiple published editions, have been cited as evidence of insecurity, indecision, and a weakness prone to exploitation—an interpretative conundrum long known in classical music circles as “The Bruckner Problem.”
But even as a graduate student, Korstvedt saw problems with the Bruckner Problem. “The way it had been dealt with by previous scholars, it became obvious to me that there were enormous contradictions in the received wisdom,” he said. “And why that was—it was almost as fascinating as sorting out the actual musical facts of the case.”
Korstvedt didn’t come to symphonic music as a fait accompli. “My musical background in high school, and even starting college, was not classically oriented at all,” he explained. “I was a guitarist at the time and played in some two-bit rock bands. When I started college, I decided to major in music. I studied jazz piano for quite a while.”
After earning his bachelor’s from Clark University, where he’s now a distinguished professor of music, Korstvedt worked in a bookstore in Worcester, Massachusetts, for a couple of years, gradually developing an academic interest in music analysis. This led him to Penn, whose groundbreaking music faculty at the time included the ethnomusicologist Marina Roseman and musicologists Gary Tomlinson and Jeffrey Kallberg.
“I look back at those six years as some of the happiest and most exciting in my life,” Korstvedt recalled. “Those years in the music department at Penn were very exciting, partly because there were several great cohorts of students coming in. But it was also an exciting moment in the field of musicology—a time when traditional approaches were not only coming into question but being supplemented by new approaches. Penn was at the forefront of a much more culturally oriented approach to musicology.”
Kallberg, now the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Music and interim dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, was at the center of that shift, which incorporated ideas from other areas of the humanities, like New Historicism, social constructionism, and textual criticism. Along with Tomlinson, now at Yale, Kallberg was intent on unmooring musicology from strict originalism. The animating idea was to situate a piece of music and its variants within a dynamic sociohistorical context.
At the same time, Kallberg valued the rigorous work of score analysis, at which Korstvedt excelled. “When Ben started grad school, there weren’t people like him, really,” he recalled. “It was unusual for a student to be so keenly interested in questions that require really detailed looking at scores—the nitty gritty of multiple versions of symphonies, in his case—and going through them with a fine-toothed comb.”
The conversation around Bruckner’s symphonic music is especially tied up with cultural and historical concerns, because of its posthumous appropriation by Adolf Hitler as a shining cultural emblem of the Third Reich. Korstvedt has written extensively about the role that Nazi ideology played in the reception of Bruckner’s work in the 1930s, especially by way of Robert Haas, a musicologist at the Austrian National Library who insisted on the absolute purity of early scores in the composer’s handwriting, fending off the “corruption” in other editions published during Bruckner’s lifetime. Haas’s fixation on the “original versions” was largely carried on by his successor, Leopold Nowak. It was also uncritically (and perhaps unwittingly) adopted by English scholars in the 1960s, who brought “the Bruckner Problem” into general circulation.
Korstvedt has dismantled this line of argument, notably the idea that Bruckner was hapless in the face of deceptive or coercive intervention by his students. Among the real-world implications is a reclamation of the Fourth Symphony’s 1888 version, which had been the canonical default until its authenticity was called into question by Haas and others. Bruckner’s Fourth presents the evidence clearly and methodically, including a reproduction of the notations that caught Korstvedt’s eye as a graduate student. Dating from February 1888, they list a numerical catalog of Bruckner’s changes to the symphony: tweaks to particular instrumental parts at specific points in the score.
“The acute attention to detail with which the composer carried out this work is palpable,” Korstvedt writes, noting that Bruckner dated the manuscript as he made his revisions. “All of this surely demonstrates the composer’s seriousness of intention in the preparation of this version.”
A larger point explored in the book is the proposition that no composer creates their work in isolation. “A symphony is, in a certain sense, an intersubjective musical genre,” Korstvedt elaborates. “It’s designed to be performed by other people, and to be heard by people. A composer like Bruckner was clearly planning and crafting this as a symphony that would be effective in performance.”
This perfectly intuitive, holistic, yet somehow provocative idea of effectiveness links Bruckner’s obsessive efforts with Korstvedt’s own. Bruckner’s Fourth bears an epigraph from Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, which reads, in part: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” Asked whether he meant to frame his defining academic work around Symphony No. 4 in Sisyphean terms, Korstvedt smiled.
“Working on this book, and on the editions—where it was literally going through hundreds of pages of music and orchestra parts … made me realize how persistent and relentless Bruckner was.” He chuckled. “I sometimes felt like: ‘Boy, he really created a puzzling mess for me to sort out.”
Nate Chinen C’97 is the editorial director at WRTI, a contributor to NPR, and a music critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times, JazzTimes, Pitchfork, and the Village Voice. He is the author of Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century and coauthor of Myself Among Others: A Life in Music, the autobiography of impresario and producer George Wein. He writes a Substack newsletter on music and culture, The Gig.