The "Country Bumpkin" composer?

Happy 200th birthday to Anton Bruckner! He looks sooo cheerful on his birthday...

The man himself was rather an oddball, according to The Guardian:

It was only in his 40s in Vienna that Bruckner felt confident enough to embark on the symphonic project that would sustain the rest of his musical life. But in doing so, he had to face the wrath of his critics, who called him everything from "a drunkard" to the composer of "symphonic boa-constrictors" (that one was Brahms). He also had to put up with caricatures of him as a devoutly, credulously Catholic country bumpkin who propositioned teenage girls in his old age, and who once tipped a conductor with cash for getting through a rehearsal of one of his symphonies...

...he had a mania for counting the bricks and windows of buildings, and for counting the numbers of bars in his gargantuan orchestral scores, making sure their proportions were statistically correct...[he was also] "death-obsessed"...

Yet, for all his weirdness, the legacy of his music lives on.

Here's a lovely sample:

Concertgebouworkest (cond. Mariss Jansons) – Symphony No. 4 ("The Romantic") - III. Scherzo [Bruckner]

A touch of much-needed class round these parts, methinks!

Anton Bruckner (4th September 1824 – 11th October 1896)