Conference Agenda

The years between 1885 and 1892 saw the most consequential changes in the fortunes of Anton Bruckner as a symphonist. From the early 1880s on, support for Bruckner had been growing steadily among Viennese journalists, musicians, and audiences, as shown by the enthusiastic responses to the premieres of the Fourth and Sixth Symphonies and the String Quintet. However, it was not until the Munich performance of the Seventh Symphony in early 1885 that Bruckner experienced the first indisputable success of his career as a symphonist.

Its brevity notwithstanding, the music-journalistic career of Hugo Wolf—which began and ended within a two-year period around the middle of the 1880s—is emblematic of the changes of opinion experienced by a number of Viennese musicians and critics vis-à-vis Bruckner’s music. Just as with the reviews of the prominent journalists Theodor Helm and Ludwig Speidel, Wolf’s opinion of Bruckner’s compositions shows a conspicuous transformation from skepticism and disapproval to enthusiastic support and admiration.

Guided by the insightful phrases with which Wolf encapsulated Bruckner’s music and career, my paper explores the Viennese reception of his compositions during the final decade of his life, and it seeks to debunk the entrenched notion that he was a helpless victim of “the Viennese press”—a notion contradicted by the pugnacious exchange in which pro- and anti-Bruckner critics invariably engaged after each of his works’ premieres in the Austrian capital.

With his multiple revisions and controversial first editions, no major composer left behind a more complex editorial puzzle than Anton Bruckner. Doctrinaire and, at times, politically and economically motivated policies of twentieth-century editors have complicated the picture even more for some pieces. As we forge ahead on a new collected works edition celebrating the 200^th anniversary of the composer’s birth, scholars and performers are bringing new perspectives to Bruckner’s complicated editorial problems. Their insights are the subject of this paper.

Many of the illustrations will come from Bruckner’s Second Symphony in C Minor because it is a poster child for almost every issue that has challenged editors, performers and audiences of Bruckner’s music since his first published work Germanenzug of 1864. The present Bruckner world has come to accept that he completed two versions of the Second Symphony, one in 1872 and another in 1877. Extensive intervening material survives, and there is a first print from 1892 edited by Cyrill Hynais. Subsequent editors have dealt with the extensive sources in different ways. In 1934, Robert Haas published a now much-maligned score that he described as the original version. It is a patchwork of passages from 1872 through 1877. In 1965, Leopold Nowak reissued the Haas score with a few modifications. Forty years later, William Carragan published a score in which he made a noble attempt to restore the first version as Bruckner had completed it in 1872, a difficult task because the composer’s revisions had obliterated passages of the original. Carragan also published a new score of the second version in 2007, deleting the passages that Haas and Nowak had borrowed from earlier sources. In the process, he included many markings from the 1892 first print. The present paper will describe some of the editorial deliberations and decisions that have been made in the preparation of new scores of both versions of the Second Symphony for the New Anton Bruckner Complete Edition.

Over the course of nearly a century, research into the texts of the symphonies of Anton Bruckner has produced remarkable results. Our view of these works has been transformed by the recovery of unpublished versions of many of the symphonies and the dismissal of other versions as corrupt. In the process, much has been learned about Bruckner’s compositional methods and a great deal of music that would otherwise have remained unknown has been brought to light. Nevertheless, these gains have not been unalloyed. The resulting profusion of versions leads many to see Bruckner’s symphonies as a confusing, if not confused, repertoire and to suspect that the composer must have been neurotically indecisive, compulsive, or the perpetual victim of editorial skullduggery. More importantly, these developments have encouraged a pervasive “orthodoxy” (Gault 2011) that has fostered misunderstanding about crucial aspects of Bruckner’s compositional work. As a result, it now seems counterproductive if not impossible to go further in this direction. In other words, the textual criticism of Bruckner’s symphonies has reached what the literary scholar Rita Felski (2015) identified as the “limits of critique.”

For this reason, a “postcritical” approach to the textual issues of Bruckner’s symphonies offers a promising path forward. Postcritique, as it has broadly come to be known, begins by abjuring a “hermeneutics of suspicion” that sets aside seemingly self-evident meanings to pursue those that have been repressed or hidden. In the case of Bruckner, a prevalent mode of critical suspicion has led to a narrow focus on recuperating and defending the “authentic” texts of his works even when this threatens to efface later phases of his compositional process.

The presentation will show, by means of carefully selected examples, that working affirmatively—but not uncritically!— to situate the compositional and textual evolution of the symphonies within the frame of the musical, material and social realities in which Bruckner worked can illuminate existing blind spots. The most notable of these include the significance of the collaborative dimensions of Bruckner’s creative process as well as the lasting value of his efforts to create effective performance texts of his symphonies.