[1] Bruck was born in a Jewish family in Temesvár, Banat, then in the Kingdom of Hungary, part of Austro-Hungarian Empire, since 1920 Timișoara in Romania.
There he studied with Alfred Cortot, Nadia Boulanger and Vlado Perlemuter at the École Normale de Musique.
After the Second World War, Bruck assumed chief conductor positions with the Orchestra of the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam (1950–1954), the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg (1955–1965), and the Orchestre Philharmonique de l'ORTF in Paris (1965–1970).
In 1969, he succeeded Monteux as director of his conducting school in Maine, a post he held for twenty-six years until his death there in 1995.
A play about his career as Master of the Pierre Monteux School, called Muse of Fire, written by David Katz, one of his students, was premiered in Maine in 2005 and has since toured extensively.