6. Publication and reception history.

Assessing the relative merits of Bruckner's various versions and searching for their raison d'être was a concern of Bruckner performers and scholars for most of the 20th century. The problem is twofold. He revised a number of his compositions, sometimes more than once, so that many are preserved in two or more manuscript versions. The masses and symphonies also appeared in printed scores, many of which differ yet again from any surviving manuscript. The precise nature of the involvement of the Schalk brothers, Ferdinand Löwe, Cyrill Hynais and Max von Oberleithner – all former pupils upon whom Bruckner relied for editorial assistance – in the publication of these scores is one of the thorniest source-critical problems of the 19th century. Controversy over the validity of ‘first editions’ over ‘manuscript’ versions lay at the heart of the Bruckner ‘Streit’ from the late 1920s to the 1940s and continues to haunt the composer's legacy. The issue has been complicated by the loss of most of the engravers’ copies for Bruckner's first editions.

The two collected works editions – the first published from 1930 to 1953 and left incomplete by Robert Haas and Alfred Orel, the second begun in 1951 by Leopold Nowak – are based primarily on the manuscripts, although each addresses the question of versions with different strategies. In his editions of the Second, Seventh and Eighth symphonies, Robert Haas spliced together different manuscript versions to produce an ideal reading. His term ‘Originalfassung’ or ‘original version’ is misleading because his scores sometimes have little to do with the actual first versions by Bruckner. Haas's score of the Eighth Symphony, for example, mainly follows manuscripts of the 1890 revision. He used ‘Originalfassung’ to distinguish his ‘manuscript’ version from the first edition of 1892. Nowak criticized Haas's ideal readings as ahistorical and published editions based on distinct manuscript versions which Bruckner made at different points in his career. Nowak identified, for example, three such versions of the Third Symphony.

For both Haas and Nowak, establishing the unauthenticity of the early prints became almost an editorial first principle. In some cases it was an easy position to take: the first editions of the Sixth and Ninth symphonies had appeared in altered scores in 1899 and 1903 respectively, years after the composer's death. Scores published while Bruckner was alive were harder to discredit. A series of arguments, sometimes tenuous, were brought to bear to the effect that the composer, in some instances, had not known what was happening and, in others, had disavowed the work of his editors. The crowning piece of evidence was the instruction in Bruckner's will, that whatever had happened during his lifetime, he wanted the ‘original’ autograph manuscript versions he had left to the library to be printed after his death.

Alfred Orel, among others, and even Haas and Nowak came to realize that ignoring all the first prints was not prudent. After the 1884–5 successes of the Seventh Symphony, Bruckner hoped that extensive publication would cement his reputation and bring financial rewards. With his consent, the Schalk brothers and Löwe made reorchestrated and abbreviated arrangements of the Third and Fourth symphonies for publication, hoping perhaps to couch Bruckner's ideas in terms more accessible to the public. They admired him as a highly gifted symphonist on paper, but whose music was marred by simplistic orchestration, too much influenced by organ registration and not sensitive enough to the performing problems of a large ensemble. Although the extent to which Bruckner participated in making these arrangements at the outset is not clear, there is no questioning that, in the case of these two symphonies, he was well aware that they had been done and corrected them extensively. The engraver's copy for the 1890 edition of the Third Symphony (A-Wn Mus.6081) is full of Bruckner's emendations, and a photograph of the lost engraver's copy, similarly corrected, for Albert Gutmann's 1889 edition of the Fourth survives in the Vienna Stadtbibliothek. These readings must be regarded as Bruckner's last versions; accordingly, Nowak included the 1890 edition of the Third in his collected works and Haas, in 1944, after Orel had called attention to the existence of an engraver's copy of the Fourth, admitted that its reading should also be included in the complete edition. However, because the engraver's manuscript has since disappeared, this version has yet to be included in the collected works.

It has already been observed that the collaboration initiated with the students in 1887 was successful from the point of view of getting Bruckner's works into print. There is evidence, primarily in the correspondence of the Schalk brothers, that Bruckner's pupils began to grow impatient with the composer's ‘tedious’ corrections to their arrangements and began to exclude him from the publication process. Even the first prints of both the Third and the Fourth symphonies contain unauthorized alterations inserted after Bruckner had placed his imprimatur on the engravers’ manuscripts. These alterations were removed from Nowak's edition of the last version of the Third Symphony. Towards the end of his life the students conspired to bypass Bruckner entirely. Perhaps the most striking case of Bruckner's loss of control over the publication process involved the Doblinger edition (1896) of the Fifth Symphony. The Schalks' letters provide incontrovertible evidence that they deceived the composer into believing it was the autograph version of the score which Franz Schalk conducted in 1895 and which they supplied to the engraver for the edition. The masses in E minor and F minor as well as the Eighth Symphony also went to the printer without Bruckner's supervision. Given the overwhelming evidence of unauthorized tampering with printed scores which appeared during the 1890s, for most of Bruckner's compositions, today the autograph manuscripts he gave to the library must be the measure by which issues of authenticity are judged.

The history of the first collected edition was marred by its association with the Nazi movement which endorsed it. Bruckner was one of Hitler's favourite composers; the correspondences between the careers of the two native sons of Upper Austria who had triumphed over the Viennese bourgeoisie were obvious. Bruckner's well-documented admiration for Wagner and his known association with ultra-nationalist predecessors of the Nazi party certainly contributed to his value in the cultural propaganda of the Third Reich. As the 1930s progressed, justification for the new Bruckner scores came to resonate more and more with the racial theories of National Socialism: the first editions had been ‘contaminated’ by ‘foreign’ influences which had to be ‘purged’ in a ‘purifying’ process to reveal the true German genius which was Bruckner. Despite these underlying ideological biases, Haas's fundamental position regarding most of the first editions continues to be valid.

After World War II, public sentiment demanded the expurgation of Nazi influences. The Bruckner who emerged was something of an Austrian mystic, a genius and a simple soul who was, at times, psychologically unstable. Although the association of his music with the Third Reich militated against its acceptance in many parts of the world, by the 1970s it had found a home in the programmes of most major orchestras and choral societies. Scholarly interest followed slowly and was confined largely to Austria and Germany for most of the century. With international conferences in the USA (New London, Connecticut) in 1994 and England (Manchester) in 1996 the situation has begun to change in the English-speaking world.

Bruckner, Anton