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2024 marks the bicentenary of the birth of Anton Bruckner, the greatest symphonist of nineteenth-century central Europe alongside Beethoven and Brahms, the spiritual «father» of the expansion of the symphony towards a scale and an ambition that only Gustav Mahler would be able to take up. «It had never happened to any composer to be called to the stage four or five times after each movement. Bruckner is the new idol of the Wagnerians». So wrote Eduard Hanslick, Brahms’s great champion, after hearing Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. They were words full of astonishment, spoken in a poisoned climate, with the pro-Wagnerians firing on Brahms and the pro-Brahmsians going after Bruckner. But the success of the Seventh came when the Austrian composer was already 60. Before that peak his career had been punctuated by incomprehension and open hostility from the sophisticated Viennese world. The Fifth Symphony, of 1877, was never heard by Bruckner in his lifetime. Hence a host of epithets never approved by the composer: «Fantastic», «Tragic», «the Pizzicato». But no label has managed to capture the spirit of a work that stands out for its fierce contrasts of timbre and dynamics, sober and severe, firmly classical in outline and carried by that irrepressible expansive force which dominates all of Bruckner’s output. Paradoxically, it is one of the main themes of the Fifth’s first movement that became a pop hit, as well as the familiar half-serious football chant that accompanied Italy’s last World Cup victory.