The New Bruckner: Compositional Developments and the Dynamics of Revision (review)

Dermot Gault’s The New Bruckner is an important book for two related yet distinct reasons. The book is motivated largely by a wish to counteract the ‘odd combination of fascination with textual issues and disregard for the research that could have shed light on them’ (p. 249). Therefore it is, in essence, a critique of what the author terms the ‘Old Bruckner Orthodoxy’, a set of largely mistaken beliefs about the texts of Bruckner’s symphonies that is entrenched among scholars, students, and especially amateur music lovers. In addition, the book offers a new view of the so-called Bruckner problem that is based on the insights of recent and current Bruckner scholarship and is intended to correct, and often replace, the established orthodoxy.

This is all very welcome because these new scholarly insights, which have emerged from historical, contextual, and text-critical research, have profound implications for our understanding, performance, and appreciation of Bruckner’s music, yet non-scholarly constituencies (critics, commentators, performers, and especially fans) have been both slow and often hesitant to awaken to them. Indeed, even the general musicological intelligence has not yet fully responded to the challenge. This book, then, is a rather bold initiative, for it directly confronts a whole network of beliefs about Bruckner and his music that have been central to their reception for generations and which, as the author recognizes, are often so dearly held that dissent is met with passionate resistance (p. 6).

The ‘Old Bruckner Orthodoxy’ holds that the only truly valid versions of the symphonies are the ‘original versions’ preserved in the collection of manuscripts that Bruckner left to the Imperial Court Library in Vienna at his death, supposedly in anticipation of ‘later times’ when these versions could finally come into their own. The versions published during the composer’s lifetime are, in contrast, seen as provisional editions prepared by Bruckner’s ‘well-meaning but misguided’ friends. According to this way of thinking, it was not until the1930s that Bruckner scholars, most famously Robert Haas, deduced the truth of these matters, and began to publish editions based on Bruckner’s original versions for inclusion in the Bruckner Collected Works edition, which rightly drove the old ‘corrupt’ versions into well-deserved oblivion. The dogmatic adherence to these ideas, which have only tenuous historical justification, has created what Gault pointedly describes as ‘the intellectual chaos of today’s popular Bruckner discourse, where any aspect of Bruckner’s music that seems anomalous’ can be dismissed as the result of editorial meddling (p.5).That viewpoint originated in German scholarship of the 1930s, yet since Gault approaches the topic from a British perspective his primary focus often rests on the prevailing influence of the Bruckner writings of Deryck Cooke and Robert Simpson, the two writers who were most influential in establishing and cultivating the ‘orthodoxy’ in the English-speaking world (see pp.242–52).

Gault does well in examining and demystifying several reported events and statements that have been given undue attention, and often tendentious interpretation, in support of the old orthodoxy. By looking at them critically and in historical context, Gault defuses tales that Mahler’s reported effort to dissuade Bruckner from revising the Third Symphony in the late 1880s inspired the Schalk brothers to frantic efforts to counteract Mahler’s influence (pp. 137–9), that Bruckner felt the need to give his manuscript of the part of the Ninth Symphony to Karl Muck for safekeeping away from the Schalks’ meddling (pp. 149 and 217), and that the composer declared that he intended his original version of the Eighth Symphony for ‘later times’ and foresaw its publication some day in the future (pp. 225–6).

While The New Bruckner draws on substantial scholarly research, Gault states clearly that ‘the book is written for students and interested lay persons’ (p. xiv). This is important, for at times the discussion skates over some thorny conceptual issues...