Grenier, Roger: Piano Music for Four Hands

In his 2001 novel, Piano Music for Four Hands, author Roger Grenier makes an interesting reference to Anton Bruckner. One gets the impression that Mr. Grenier is all for the Nowak edition of the Bruckner Seventh.

“As he stood in the little woods in front of the trees climbing up the hillside as if to imitate the rise of a Gothic cathedral in their effort to pull themselves up from the ground and reach the sky, he thought of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony, so religious but even more sublime when it spoke simply of our own world here below, with its great waves of feeling that carried you further and further, toward what abyss? And he wondered if, at measure 177 it was better to strike the cymbal or to omit it. Bruckner, hesitating, had crossed it out. In 1940 the woods had echoed with a metallic din, and the cymbal would have been very suitable. But what could the little wood of the Vallée Heureuse, with its bird songs, have to do with a crashing cymbal?”

My thanks to Benjamin Korstvedt for this entry..

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Roger Grenier. Piano Music for Four Hands, trans. Alice Kaplan
(Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2001), p. 36