ANTON BRUCKNER
(1824 - 1896)
Anton Bruckner
Anton Bruckner’s friends and pupils repeatedly requested the Master’s approval for retouchings and changes which, often of a quite intrusive nature, affecting form, instrumentation and articulation, were intended to make his quite unprecedented sound-world more accessible to contemporary audiences.
We have every reason to be grateful to these friends and pupils for their missionary zeal; after all, the motivation behind the changes was the wider propagation and promotion of Bruckner’s music. In order to smooth the path for his works to be performed and published, Bruckner did give his provisional agreement to adaptations designed to bring his music closer into line with the prevailing spirit of the times. But his agreement was only provisional – when he entrusted his manuscripts to the Imperial and Royal Court Library (the present-day Austrian National Library), he bequeathed his music to us in the form in which he 'according to his last will and testament' wished it to be passed on to posterity.
After Bruckner’s death, the glaring discrepancies between the autograph manuscripts and the music being heard in concert led to a call for a critical complete edition to provide the basis for authentic performing material. In 1929 the International Bruckner Society (Internationale Bruckner-Gesellschaft, IBG for short) was founded in Vienna; 1930 witnessed the publication by Filser, Augsburg, of the first works in the Complete Bruckner Edition (Bruckner-Gesamtausgabe), namely the Requiem and the Missa Solemnis (Haas). On 2 April 1932, Siegmund von Hausegger gave two consecutive renditions of the Ninth Symphony. In the first he used the only printed edition then in existence, which had been produced with the intention of making Bruckner’s music sound Wagnerian and consequently differed quite radically from Bruckner’s manuscript; the second performance was based on the autograph musical text as prepared for the Complete Edition.
In 1933, by which time the Filser publishing house had ceased to exist, the International Bruckner Society founded the Musikwissenschaftlicher Verlag (MWV; literally 'musicological publishers'), specifically to publish the Bruckner Complete Edition. Robert Haas, Director of the Music Collection of the Austrian National Library, was appointed General Editor, with Alfred Orel as his right-hand man; in 1937, Leopold Nowak joined the house as co-General Editor. The preparatory work which had already been under way for many years previously made it possible for numerous volumes to be published in quick succession.
Chronology of the Bruckner Complete Edition 1934-1944
The Bruckner Complete Edition since 1951
After the end of the war, the IBG, MWV and Bruckner Complete Edition returned to Austria; in 1951, Leopold Nowak, now General Editor, brought out the first volume of the newly started Bruckner Complete Edition, a corrected reprint of Alfred Orel’s edition of the Ninth Symphony. In the first instance, Nowak devoted himself to revising the scores which had been edited before 1945, incorporating newly-discovered sources and eliminating printing errors. It soon became clear that Nowak’s veritably philological faithfulness to the musical texts bequeathed by Bruckner to posterity (repeatedly revised by the composer, it must be remembered) was quite incompatible with Haas’s attempts to produce a kind of 'ideal version' of the Second and the Eighth by mixing the composer’s versions. True to his principles, Nowak published the Symphony No. 8 in its two quite decisively different versions in two separate volumes, and furthermore published a revised Symphony No. 7 in full accordance with the 'last will and testament' autograph, replacing the earlier edition in which Haas had decided to ignore the amendments Bruckner had effected by sticking new music in over the old, or by erasing the old with a razor-blade.
Chronology of the Bruckner Complete Edition 1951-1989 (General Editor: Leopold Nowak)
Chronology of the Complete Bruckner Edition from 1990
The Ninth – a symphony in a category of its own
Critical reports
For further information on the history of the Bruckner Complete Edition
Related Information
Anton Bruckner Complete Edition until 2014
Complete EditionNew Anton Bruckner Complete Edition
New Complete Edition