To Anton Bruckner the autumn of 1887 brought profound inner satisfaction, but also, bitter disappointment. "Halleluja! - the Eight is finished at last and my 'father in-music' must be the first to hear the news" was how Bruckner started a letter to Hermann Levi on 4 September 1887. On 19 September Bruckner sent him the score with the significant words: "I hope it meets with your approval". He must have been full of confidence that his creative powers were at their zenith, which made it all the more agonising when he heard from Josef Schalk that Levi could not give the Symphony his blessing. Some of Bruckner's other friends and pupils were also at a loss what to make the gigantic work: they were unable at first to appreciate the true greatness, inward and spiritual as well as outward and visible, of the last symphony that Bruckner was able to complete.

During that October of 1887 the attitude of Bruckner's acquaintances is known to have brought him to such a pitch of dejection that he almost lost all confidence in himself. He was not even able to get down to work on the Ninth Symphony that he had just started on. But as time went on he somehow or other managed to get over his disappointment, and we know from a letter from Josef Schalk to Levi dated 18 October 1887 that by mid-October he had started on drastic revision of the entire Symphony. The preparation of this second version gave Bruckner a good deal of trouble, aggravated by his being interrupted by having to prepare the Fourth Symphony for publication as well as revising the Third.

From 4 March 1889 the stages of his revision can be followed with considerable accuracy. It was on this day, the same day as the revision of the Third was completed, that Bruckner started work on the Adagio, which he finished on 8 May. Then he turned to the Finale, which he completed on 31 July. The Scherzo took him from August to September, and between November 1899 and 29 January 1890 the first retirement was "entirely renovated"; But he returned to it later and it was not until 10 March 1890 that he was "ganz fertig", which meant that the whole of the second version of the Eighth Symphony was finished. But still not absolutely finally, for in one of Bruckner's diaries there is an entry on 14 March: "went through the whole of the first movement of the Eighth Symphony in my head for the last time".

*19.480 in the Austrian National Library's Music Collection consists of the MSS of the first second, and fourth movements of the present revised second version. The Adagio is in the possession of Frau Lili Schalk, to whom thanks are due for making it available to the compilers of the complete edition of Bruckner's works.

This edition of the second version of Bruckner's Eighth Symphony is exactly as Bruckner wrote it. The course followed by Robert Haas, in his first edition of 1939, of reverting to the first version in some passages has not been pursued: to have done so would have led to considerable confusion. A complete critical edition must not mix its sources: the result would be a score that would not tally with either version and would certainly not be in accordance with Bruckner's wishes. All the cuts in Bruckner's own hand in the Adagio and Finale, "opened" by Haas in the first edition, have been restored; in the Adagio, the ten bars before Q; and in the Finale the bars between O and P, the four bars between Q and R, the passage before Oo and ten bars after it, and the four bars between Tt and Uu. Of the seven cuts in the Finale, two were retained in the first edition: the 8-bar passage beginning at 8 bars after T, and two bars before Uu, crossed out by Bruckner himself, at the beginning of the Coda.

There were similar inaccuracies over passages where Haas reverted to the instrumentation of the first version, especially in the Adagio. Here too passages made up of material from both versions have had to be emended, especially as all the corrections in the original Ms are in Bruckner's own hand, there are no signs of emendations by anyone else. That Bruckner bowed to other people's opinions (and not only in this Symphony) is a fact that just has to be accepted, but this does not warrant ignoring alterations in Bruckner's own hand. The 1887 score of the Eighth Symphony will clearly show the difference between the two versions. Bruckner's revision included a number of important alterations in the form as well as in the scoring (triple wood-wind instead of double, etc.). The fff end of the First movement is cut, so that in the second version the movement ends pp; a completely new Trio is substituted; and the climax of the Adagio is in E flat instead of C. Bruckner also made alterations in the long climaxes as well as authorising the cuts enumerated above.

There are a good many discrepancies between the first edition of March 1892 (nor 1891) and Bruckner's original, especially in the instrumentation, but as they are not by Bruckner himself they have not been retained in the present edition. The same applies to bars 93-98 in the Finale (an echo of the Seventh Symphony), which are not in the first edition. In a letter to Max von Oberleithner dated 5 August 1891 Josef Schalk admits that he made this cut (amongst others) because "he could see no point" in this "reminiscence of the Seventh Symphony", Nor was he altogether wrong, because the cut authorised by Bruckner himself before Oo includes the whole of this passage in the recapitulation. So in the second version the thematic balance is impaired, but as the decision was Bruckner's own nothing can be done about it, especially as Bruckner's cuts are confirmed by his metrical "figures". Josef Schalk made a number of alterations and additions in the scoring too, alter conferring with his brother Franz and Max von Oberleithner.

Bruckner dedicated his Eighth Symphony to the Emperor Franz Joseph I, who accepted the dedication and defrayed the cost of printing. The first performance by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under Hans Richter in the Grosser Musikvereinssaal in Vienna on 18 December 1892 was a triumph the like of which Bruckner had never enjoyed before, in a letter to Emil Kauffmann in Tubingen on 23 December Hugo Wolf could not contain his enthusiasm: "This Symphony is the creation of a Titan, and in spiritual vastness, fertility of ideas and grandeur even surpasses his other symphonies, Notwithstanding the usual Cassandra prophecies of woe, even from those in the know, its success was almost without precedent. It was the absolute victory of light over darkness, and the storm of applause at the end of each movement was like some elemental manifestation of Nature. In short, even a Roman Emperor could not have wished for a more superb triumph."

(translated by Richard Rickett)

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