Revisions and Editions
The Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Symphonies represent Bruckner's period of greatest confidence as a composer, and apart from his unfinished Ninth Symphony, they are the only symphonies in which Bruckner did not make extensive revisions. In fact, the Sixth Symphony is the only Bruckner symphony that was exempt from any revisions from the composer himself. However, Gustav Mahler made substantial changes to the score before he conducted the 1899 premiere of the symphony in its entirety, revisions unsanctioned by Bruckner as they were posthumous.
The first published edition of the Sixth Symphony also occurred in 1899 and was overseen by Cyrill Hynais, a former student of Bruckner. However, this edition encompassed a few minute changes from Bruckner's original score, namely the repetition of the second half of the Trio in the third movement. The next printed edition came to fruition in 1935, edited by Robert Haas, and is the edition most commonly performed today. In 1951, Leopold Nowak also published an edition that was an exact replication of Bruckner's original 1881 score. The edition performed under the direction of Mahler for the premiere was never published.
Read more about this topic: Symphony No. 6 (Bruckner)
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“The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
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