In the more than 100 years since his death in 1896, the appraisals by musicologists, critics and the public at large of Anton Bruckner, the man, and Anton Bruckner, the composer, have consistently been radical in character. From the beginning, the standpoints of Bruckner disciples and Bruckner haters have been virtually irreconcilable. Few cases in musical historiography have featured such a diversity of standpoints regarding the importance of an oeuvre and its creator for European music. For the longest time, clichés and stereotypes set the tone of Bruckner reception, with Bruckner himself tending to be the focus of attention. This approach was typically accompanied by questionable characterisations which stood in the way of any objective investigation, e.g., ‘God’s musician,’ ‘Upper-Austrian peasant,’ ‘hero of German composition’ and ‘half genius, half idiot.’ It was not until the 1980s that Bruckner’s musical oeuvre, as such, started being subjected to greater scrutiny (than its creator). In particular Germanspeaking musicologists, with the help of detailed work analyses, began to approach the phenomenon of Anton Bruckner using a method which set aside the questionable anecdotes and speculations surrounding the personage, Bruckner, and concentrated above all on the facts: i.e., the surviving musical texts (in which connection the version problem became the foremost priority).