What better present could there be for a composer than making his works available in the best possible form? 4 September 2024 is the 200th anniversary of Anton Bruckner’s birth. A season full of performances of his works awaits. And several of these will be memorable first performances, as Musikwissenschaftlicher Verlag Wien is preparing new editions of the much-discussed versions of the Bruckner symphonies. These include the annulled Symphony in D minor of 1869, the first version of the Fourth, the Sixth, Seventh and the Adagio of 1887-1889 and the second version of the Eighth. The New Anton Bruckner Complete Edition is published under the patronage of the Austrian National Library and the International Bruckner Society with support from the Vienna Philharmonic.

On 2 April 1932 Sigmund von Hausegger conducted the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra in a concert that set off one of the most vitriolic controversies in the history of western music and altered the world’s understanding of Anton Bruckner’s music. The orchestra performed the composer’s Ninth Symphony twice – once from the first edition (1903) edited by Ferdinand Löwe, and then from the version in the autograph manuscript that the composer had bequeathed to the Imperial Library in Vienna. In the face of prevailing opinion, the International Bruckner Society, which had organized the concert, hoped to demonstrate that the previously unperformed manuscript version was not only playable, but also musically superior. The Society was so gratified by the success of the manuscript version that it determined that same day to use all the manuscripts Bruckner had left to the library as the basis for its Collected Works Edition that had begun to appear in 1929. Robert Haas, coeditor of the Collected Works,

argued, at times on slender evidence that, prior to the publication of the new edition, Bruckner’s editors – Franz and Josef Schalk, Ferdinand Löwe, Max von Oberleithner and Cyrill Hynais, all of whom had been students of the composer -- had altered the master’s scores without his knowledge or permission. Or worse, they had coerced a composer, victim of years of conflict and rejection in Vienna and notorious for revising his pieces, into making ill-advised changes. The new Collected Works should replace the nineteenth-century editions of all Bruckner’s major works.

The Haas position did not go unchallenged. His scores provoked the so-called Bruckner-Streit, one of the most extended controversies in the history of modern musical literature. Haas’s opponents pointed out that the early editors had been Bruckner’s students and friends who had worked tirelessly on the composer’s behalf for years in a hostile Viennese environment. Bruckner had been grateful for their support and had attended and applauded performances of the readings in their editions. Those readings were infinitely superior from a performance standpoint to those of the autograph manuscripts. Extensive eyewitness testimony was summoned to the effect that nothing had happened in the preparation of his contemporary publications without Bruckner’s approval.

The opposition notwithstanding, by the 1950s, the manuscript versions had prevailed. It then began to emerge that Haas’s scores themselves were flawed. He often tried to produce an ideal reading by mixing and matching passages from different versions that Bruckner left as a result of his numerous revisions. In a few places, Haas even recomposed passages himself. In the 1950s and early 1960s, his successor as editor of the Complete Works, Leopold Nowak, corrected some of these passages as he re-released the volumes Haas and his co-editor, Alfred Orel, had published. Because Nowak used many of his predecessors’ plates, the core of Bruckner’s repertoire has not been subject to a thorough new edit since the 1940’s. With one exception, Nowak continued the policy of ignoring the first editions and, for most of the rest of the century, they remained on the library shelf. Nowak must be given credit for editing different previously unpublished versions of the composer’s major works.

Even as Nowak did his work, evidence began to accumulate that supporters of the first editions were in large part correct at least about some of the symphonies. In 1959 Nowak published the final or 1889 printed version of the Third Symphony, demonstrating that, although the contents of the first edition itself had been tampered with, Franz Schalk had participated as a co-composer in the preparation of the reading in the engraver’s copy. In 2004, Benjamin Korstvedt showed that Ferdinand Löwe and the Schalk brothers had prepared the engraver’s copy of the 1889/90 edition of the Fourth Symphony entirely with the composer’s cooperation and blessing. As a result of Nowak’s and Korstvedt’s work, the past two decades have seen numerous calls to look again at the editions that were published in Bruckner’s lifetime.

In 2011, an international group of Bruckner scholars met with the Musikwissenschaftlicher Verlag Wien, which has published the collected works since the 1930s, to lay plans for a New Anton Bruckner Complete Edition (NBG). The new edition is applying the extensive research that has been devoted to the composer since Leopold Nowak’s passing in 1991 to addressing the many editorial controversies and inconsistencies that have plagued the reception of this great master for more than a century. Scholars from around the world are applying the most up-to-date editorial methods in preparing texts designed for modern practical usage. In the process, all manuscripts that have come to light in recent years are being consulted, as are all other sources, including first editions. The results have already been remarkable. Thomas Röder’s new edition of the first version of the First Symphony contains the previously unpublished reading of the score that Bruckner conducted himself in 1868 – i.e. the real Linz version. The outer movements of the NBG score of the Seventh Symphony contain numerous tempo and meter changes omitted from all previous editions. It also contains a number of passages in which the orchestration has been changed on the basis of the autograph score and establishes beyond a doubt that Bruckner added the triangle and cymbal to the slow movement.

All volumes of the NBG will first appear in cloth-bound full conductors’ scores. Parts will be available for rental from Alkor Edition Kassel. Bruckner’s various score orders and methods of notating cellos, French horns, trumpets and Wagner tubas are being standardized according to modern practice. Works that Bruckner revised will be published in all distinguishable surviving versions. Each volume will include an extensive Introduction discussing the genesis and reception history of the version it contains as well as a detailed Editorial Report on all the sources that have been consulted. The Introductions and Reports will be printed in both German and English.

The first volume to appear was Thomas Röder’s edition of the First Symphony in 2016. Since then, three more volumes have been published: Benjamin Korstvedt’s scores of the second version and the 1878 “Volksfest” finale of the Fourth Symphony, and Paul Hawkshaw’s edition of the first version of the Eighth Symphony. In preparation for publication soon are the annulled Symphony in D Minor of 1869 (David Chapman), the first version of the Fourth (Korstvedt), the Sixth (John Williamson), the Seventh (Hawkshaw), and the Adagio of 1887-1889 and second version of the Eighth (Hawkshaw). A little further down the pipeline are the second version of the First (Röder), two versions of the Second (Gabriel Ignacio Venegas and Hawkshaw), three versions of the Third (Röder), and the Fifth (Dermot Gault). The New Anton Bruckner Complete Edition is being published under the auspices of the Austrian National Library and the International Bruckner Society with the patronage of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.

Paul Hawkshaw
(July 2023)