Part one : A character portrait -- Who was Bruckner? -- Authoritarianism and self-assurance -- Neurosis -- Libido -- Emotionality -- The "passionate urge to compose" -- Securing an income -- Persecution mania -- Worries about the success of the work -- Interest in the exceptional -- "Sympathy with death" -- Religiosity -- Part two : Sacred music -- Personality and oeuvre -- Music as religious confession -- A new, dramatic conception of the mass -- The credo settings -- Religious tone symbolism -- Jubilant and devotional music -- "Let me not be confounded in eternity" : the Te Deum -- Music as song of praise -- Part three : The symphonies -- The fiction of "absolute music" -- Originality and modernity -- Matters of style -- How Bruckner came to the symphony -- Autiographic elements in the Second and Third Symphonies -- The allegiance to Richard Wagner -- The triad of the middle symphonies -- The Seventh : a second "Wagner symphony" -- Secular and religious -- Imaginations : Bruckner's associations in the Eighth -- The Ninth : Bruckner's "farewell to life" -- Reflections on the Bruckner interpretation : Günter Wand, Eugen Jochum and Sergiu Celibidache -- The progressive.