The authorship of the Apollo-Marsch has long been subject to question. It seems
to have first been attributed to Bruckner in 1897 by Heinrich Rietsch (Hawkshaw
1989, 8), and this contention was supported by Max Graf in 1902. Graf claimed,
without providing any documentation, that both this march and the March in E-Flat
Major were composed for the band of the Jäger battalion in Linz in 1865 ( Graf
1902, 584). However, since this march exists only in a handwritten, fair-copy
manuscript that is unattributed and undated, Bruckner scholars had begun to ques-
tion this attribution by the 1930s. It was generally surmised that the Apollo-Marsch
became associated with Bruckner because the score was among his papers at the
time of his death. Unfortunately, very poor records were kept of the distribution of
the composer's effects, and it is no longer possible to confirm whether he ever
owned this manuscript (Hawkshaw 1989, 10).

The widely accepted view is that the score of the Apollo-Marsch was given to
Bruckner during the summer of 1865 to serve as a model for his E-Flat Major
March. The two works do have a number of similarities. Both are in the same key,
both are scored for identical ensembles, and both use approximately the same form.
However, Bruckner studied the march form with Otto Kitzler early in 1862 (Hawk-
shaw 1989, 10), and it is possible that this score was given to him at that time if,
indeed, he ever owned it at all.

In 1984 Werner Probst proved that the Apollo-Marsch is identical to the
Mazzuchelli March, op. 22 by the Hungarian composer, violinist, and bandmaster
Kéler Béla (Probst 1984, 6). Kéler was the bandmaster of the 10th Austrian Infan-
try Regiment in Vienna in 1856 (Suppan 1988, 193-94). He wrote this march in
1857, dedicating it to the Feldzeugmeister Count Alois Mazzuchelli (Probst 1984,
6). It would appear, then, that the only question left unresolved is how this work
managed to change titles between 1857 and either 1862 or 1865.

In retrospect, how the Apollo-Marsch could ever have been attributed to Bruc-
kner is difficult to understand. Other than its superficial similarities to the Marchin E-Flat

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