Bruckner and trains

[ppppenguin]

Well found sir! Thank you. I now have the transmission date, the title and the presenter's name.

During the next 41 years he came upon no mention of any association between Bruckner and railways until, on 26 May  1986, the BBC broadcast a talk by David Elliot, son of Sir John Elliot of the Southern Railway, with the title 'A Composer on the Footplate, some revealing new evidence on the sources of Bruckner's inspiration'. He recorded the talk, which he found very interesting, but when he listened to it again he became suspicious, so he checked a few dates, and the suspicions multiplied.

Bruckner was born at Ansfelden near Linz on 4 September 1824. In 1851, when he was 27 and just beginning his work as a composer, the first trans-alpine railway was being built over the Semmering Pass. Marshall did not know if Bruckner was interested in this. A competition was arranged for a locomotive capable of working trains over the severe gradients. The winning locomotive, named Bavaria, was built by J A Maffei of Munich. The axles were coupled by chains, not rods. This chain transmission soon gave trouble and the engine did little useful work. (Lionel Wiener, Articulated Locomotives, Kalmbach, Milwaukee, Wis, 1970, pp246 et seq.) The opportunity for Bruckner to see it working seems slim.
Bruckner was one of the last pupils of Simon Sechter, 1788-1867, who, we are led to believe, introduced Bruckner to his friends the Golsdorfs, the great Austrian locomotive engineers. Both, Mr Elliot tells us, were keen musicians. Louis Adolf Golsdorf was born at Plaue near Augustusburg, Saxony, on 14 February 1837 and so was 12½ years younger than Bruckner and was only 14 at the time of the Semmering Trials. His more famous son Karl was born in Vienna, but not until 8 June 1861 when Bruckner was 37. Karl was only 6 when Sechter died at the age of 79 and Louis was 30, hardly a basis for an intimate friendship, musical or otherwise. We are told that Bruckner and Karl Golsdorf were invited onto the footplate of the Bavaria, ten years before Karl was born. By now my credence was becoming over-stretched.
About this time I had occasion to write to Dr Schuh, then archivist of Austrian State Railways Administration Library and Documentation, and took the opportunity to ask if he had any record of a friendship between L A Golsdorf and Anton Bruckner. In his reply he said he had been unable to find any reference to such a friendship. He also sent me a copy of a substantial obituary article published in the Zeitschrift des Vereines deutscher Ingenieure (Journal of the Society of German Engineers), Vol 60, 6 May 1916, pp396-8, following the death of Karl Golsdorf on 18 March which says nothing about any musical interests.
He had begun to draft a letter to Mr Elliot when he received the Stephenson Locomotive Society Journal for March/April 1987. There, on p61, I saw that I had been forestalled by a letter to the BBC from Mr David Cole which brought forth a reply from Mr Elliot revealing that the programme had been intended to go out on 1 April 1986 as a clever April fool's hoax.
The trouble with this is that people will believe it if they are not also railway historians. Even the great Bruckner scholar Robert Simpson believed it until informed otherwise. So it gets into the 'system' and nothing will eradicate it, and 'secondary-source historians' will go on repeating it for ever. Philip Scowcroft's mention may be an example.
Much as he should like to know that one of his favourite composers was also a railway enthusiast, he should need to read evidence of it dating before May 1986, preferably from an original source in German.

This gives the broadcast date as a day earlier:
http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/fb5a95d5a7c04...ff239195c6