At the end of the 19th century, it was equivalent to declaring your religion: You treasured and played the symphonies either of Johannes Brahms or of Anton Bruckner – to love both equally seemed utterly out of the question. But Christian Thielemann and the Staatskapelle Dresden stopped worrying about such ancient turf battles long ago. In the first of their two concerts, on 9 September, they will perform Bruckner’s Eighth, while the next day, 10 September, brings the Brahms First. But what did these two composers actually think of each other?

There seemed to be an unbridgeably deep gap between the devoutly Catholic Anton Bruckner and the North German Brahms, who was baptized a Protestant but was tolerant to the point of being a freethinker. There was only one question that Brahms didn’t want to discuss: “Everything has its limits,” he remarked. “Bruckner lies beyond them, and you can’t even talk about his work. He is a poor, crazy person whom the clergy of St. Florian have on their conscience.” Brahms accused Bruckner of having “no inkling of musical consistency, no idea about how to create an ordered musical structure” in his symphonies. When the publisher Albert J. Gutmann referred to the “great thoughts” Bruckner’s symphonies contained, Brahms shot back: “If I’d been in your place, I would have simply published these great thoughts and thus saved a lot of money.”

For his part, Bruckner’s attitude toward the symphonic works of Brahms reflected the exact opposite standpoint. In the opening movement of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto, according to the Austrian composer’s student Friedrich Eckstein, Bruckner reportedly “found the first theme to be splendid but regretted that in all his symphonies Brahms had never again managed to come close to such a theme. As for the symphonies themselves, he felt instead that they were negligible, lacking in invention, devoid of any genuine greatness, harmonically uninteresting in their themes, shallowly developed, and colorless in instrumentation.” Today we can smile over these kinds of biases. In any case, in their Lucerne concerts Christian Thielemann and his new orchestra will prove that the path between Brahms and Bruckner is hardly as wide a stretch as it might seem.