The first volume of the New Anton Bruckner Complete Edition contains the “Linz Version” of his 1st Symphony, based on the latest evaluation of the sources. The work will be performed using this edition for the first time at the Salzburg Festival.

Probably no-one in the audience who, despite the bright spring weather, chose to enter the Redoutensaal in Linz at 5pm on 9 May 1868 to hear the symphony by the cathedral organist, imagined that a memorable occasion in the history of symphonic composition had arrived. Did anyone in the orchestra guess it? For example Franz Simandl, who would one day become the doyen of double bass playing, and was doing his military service here in Linz?

At any rate Simandl autographed his part, perhaps conscious of the fact that this concert was indeed something special. Admittedly the audience, distinguished and discriminating, did not attend in sufficient numbers for the composer to be able to cover his expenses. From press reports we can deduce that the audience was well aware how the musicians from the local Ständetheater and the Garrison were tested to the limits of their abilities. It’s not surprising that the work was chosen to be performed in Vienna from the beginning.

Anton Bruckner’s 1st Symphony disappeared into the composer’s archive for almost twenty years. From about 1886 onwards there began to be an increasing interest in the early work of the now well-established symphonist. A first Viennese performance was planned for 1889, but Bruckner unceremoniously withdrew the work and devoted a year to reworking it. Shortly afterwards it was performed and published.

Only in 1935 did the original form of the 1st Symphony become known. Robert Haas prepared the music text for the Complete Edition and enabled Peter Raabe to launch the work in 1934, in advance of its publication, at the Bruckner Festival in Aachen. Soon both audiences and performers began to prefer this version to the later first printed edition. However, their dubbing it the “Linz Version” obscures the fact that Bruckner’s manuscripts, which bear numerous traces of the beginnings of the 1889 revision and had evidently been subject to some interventions from Bruckner in the preceding years, were used as the basis of the music text.

The launch of the New Anton Bruckner Complete Edition offered the opportunity to get as close as possible via the music text to the historic first performance of the “Linz Symphony”. The result is based on the reproduction of the 1868 performing version as it survives in the individual parts. The new edition attempts (as with further planned volumes) to satisfy current requirements for a historical-critical edition by establishing an authoritative music text and providing detailed information and the history of the work’s composition. Differences from the well-known edition are clearly listed in the accompanying material. These also include the early version of the Scherzo, previously published separately, from which the innovative potential of this famous movement can only really be appreciated. Yet right at the beginning of the work, the difference from the later revision is evident. The “empty” first bar, emotion-laden, which Bruckner only added later, is missing. This served to clarify the relationships of the bar accents; he proceeded in similar fashion in other passages in the first movement. A piece of music, somewhat “rougher”, or perhaps “more uncouth” in some details, which displays the spirit of optimism of its creator and his era, still undaunted.

Thomas Röder
(translation: Elizabeth Robinson)
(from [t]akte 1/2014)