The International Bruckner Society (German Internationale Bruckner-Gesellschaft ) was an organization which began its existence in 1927 in Leipzig and was officially founded in 1929 in Vienna . Its main purpose since then has been to publish editions of the music of Anton Bruckner . Most of Bruckner's music had been published during the composer's lifetime or shortly after his death, but often in versions that incorporated numerous changes suggested by his friends and students. In the case of Bruckner's unfinished Ninth Symphony , Bruckner student Ferdinand Loewe made several unauthorized changes even after Bruckner's death. The mission of the International Bruckner Society was to publish versions of Bruckner's works based directly on the original manuscripts, which the composer had bequeathed to the Austrian National Library.
22-603: The Society hired Robert Haas as General Editor, with Alfred Orel as his assistant. The first publication was Orel's critical edition of the Ninth Symphony, published in 1934 but premiered two years earlier in 1932 in a concert by Siegmund von Hausegger conducting the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra . In this concert the Ninth Symphony was performed twice: once in the Loewe edition and again in
44-563: A great productive artist [i.e., Bruckner] can be 'put under pressure' for the duration of a depression. ... The falsification that is done here to the character of Bruckner - Bruckner as a fool - is much greater than [that done] by the essays [attempts?] of the first scholars, Loewe and Schalk." On the other hand, conductor Georg Tintner , even as a Jewish victim of Nazi persecution, subsequently described Haas as "brilliant" and called Haas's edition of Bruckner's Eighth Symphony "the best" of all available versions although he himself chose to record
66-407: A revised manuscript of 1890 which incorporated suggestions from Franz Schalk , Arthur Nikisch and others, and the first published edition of 1892 which went even further in the direction of the changes, including significant cuts, suggested by Bruckner's friends. Haas decided to make a composite edition based on the 1890 manuscript but adding in some passages from the 1887 version he (justifiably, in
88-590: The Bayreuth Festspielhaus was in 1960. The Ring cycle he conducted there in that year was notable for multiple casting, with the role of Wotan split between Hermann Uhde and Jerome Hines , and Brünnhilde between Astrid Varnay and Birgit Nilsson . Kempe was associated with the Royal Philharmonic (RPO) from 1955. In 1960, he became its Associate Conductor, chosen by the orchestra's founder, Sir Thomas Beecham . In 1961 and 1962 he
110-738: The Third symphony was destroyed during the war.} Haas's editions of Bruckner are controversial. Writing for the Cambridge University Press , Benjamin Korstvedt charges that in the Second, Seventh and Eighth symphonies Haas made changes to Bruckner's musical texts that "went beyond the limits of scholarly responsibility". For example, the Eighth Symphony existed in three versions: Bruckner's original manuscript of 1887,
132-544: The Third Symphony, edited by Fritz Oeser . Nowak continued as General Editor until 1989, by which time the Society had published multiple versions of the symphonies and also numerous other works by Bruckner. Nowak was a more scholarly and less creative editor than Haas: he saw his task as reproducing all the different versions that Bruckner wrote on the basis of the manuscript and printed sources, and documenting all
154-702: The Wiener Singspiel, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johann Sebastian Bach . Rudolf Kempe Rudolf Kempe (14 June 1910 – 12 May 1976) was a German conductor . Kempe was born in Dresden , where from the age of fourteen he studied at the Dresden State Opera School. He played oboe in the opera orchestra of Dortmund and then in the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra, from 1929. In addition to oboe, he played
176-579: The army." The first was violinist Christa Ruppert . In 1970, the RPO named him Conductor for Life, but in 1975, he resigned his post with the orchestra. From 1965 to 1972 Kempe worked with Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich , and from 1967 to his death conducted the Munich Philharmonic , with whom he made international tours and recorded the first quadraphonic set of the Beethoven symphonies. In
198-650: The chief conductorship of the Chemnitz opera house. Kempe directed the Dresden Opera and the Staatskapelle Dresden from 1949 to 1952, making his first records, including Der Rosenkavalier , Die Meistersinger and Der Freischütz . 'He obtains some superlative playing from the Dresden orchestra,' commented The Record Guide . He maintained a relationship with the Dresden orchestra for
220-519: The composer). The Society had officially been dissolved in 1938 immediately after the Anschluss (although publication of the complete edition continued from Leipzig ). After World War II the Society was refounded in Vienna. Haas was fired because of his Nazi connections and publication resumed under a new General Editor: Leopold Nowak . The first post-war publication was a critical edition of
242-483: The differences in great detail. The post-war Nowak editions became more commonly performed and recorded than the pre-war Haas versions, although a significant number of conductors continued to prefer Haas. The Society continued to produce new editions of Bruckner's works after Nowak stepped down. It also sponsors periodicals and scholarship dedicated to Bruckner. Robert Haas (musicologist) Robert Maria Haas (15 August 1886, Prague – 4 October 1960, Vienna)
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#1732772839577264-580: The new Orel edition, and its success provided much impetus for a complete critical edition of Bruckner's work. Between 1935 and 1944 Haas published editions of all the remaining numbered symphonies except for the Third (Haas's work on this symphony was destroyed in a wartime incident). In several cases, multiple revisions of a single symphony existed in the manuscripts, and Haas did not hesitate to combine material from different versions to produce what he considered an "ideal" version for publication (even though it did not correspond to anything actually written by
286-555: The original 1887 version. Many conductors including Herbert von Karajan , Bernard Haitink , Daniel Barenboim , Takashi Asahina and Günter Wand continued to prefer Haas's editions, even after the Nowak editions became available. Haas also edited some of the music of Hugo Wolf , Claudio Monteverdi 's Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria , Christoph Willibald von Gluck 's Don Juan ballet score, and other Baroque music. He also wrote about
308-537: The piano regularly, as a soloist, in chamber music or accompanying, as a result of which, in 1933, the new Director of the Leipzig Opera invited Kempe to become a répétiteur , and later a conductor, for the opera. During the Second World War Kempe was conscripted into the army, but instead of active service was directed into musical activities, playing for the troops and later taking over
330-593: The rest of his life, making some of his best-known records with them during the stereo era. His international career began with engagements at the Vienna State Opera in the 1951 season, for which he conducted Die Zauberflöte , Simon Boccanegra , and Capriccio . He was invited to succeed Georg Solti as chief conductor of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich from 1952 to 1954, and
352-542: The view of many Brucknerians, including conductors Rudolf Kempe and Georg Tintner ) thought it a shame to lose: he also rewrote a brief passage himself. Haas thus produced a text of the symphony, however laudable on its own merits, that didn't happen to correspond to anything ever written or approved by Bruckner. Similar reworking occurs in Haas's edition of the Second Symphony. Some scholars have suggested that Haas
374-469: Was Principal Conductor of the RPO, and from 1963 to 1975 its Artistic Director. A member of the RPO later said of Kempe, "He was a wonderful controller of the orchestra, and a very great accompanist ... Kempe was like someone driving a racing-car, following the piano round the bends." Kempe abolished Beecham's male-only rule, introducing women into the RPO: an orchestra without them, he said, "always reminds me of
396-825: Was an Austrian musicologist. At the beginning of his career with the Austrian national library, Haas was mostly interested in Baroque and Classical music. Later on, he was engaged by the newly formed International Bruckner Society to work on a complete edition of Anton Bruckner 's symphonies and Masses based on the original manuscripts bequeathed by the composer to the Vienna library. Between 1935 and 1944 Haas published editions of Bruckner's, Sixth (1935), Fifth (1935), First (1935), Fourth (1936 and 1944), Second , Eighth (1939) and Seventh (1944) symphonies. (A scholarly edition of Bruckner's Ninth symphony had already been produced in 1932 by Alfred Orel , while Haas's work on
418-548: Was immensely popular there, leading among other works, Salome , Elektra , Der Rosenkavalier , Der Ring des Nibelungen , Un Ballo in Maschera and Madama Butterfly , of which the critic Andrew Porter compared Kempe's operatic conducting favourably with that of Arturo Toscanini and Victor de Sabata . As a guest conductor, Kempe frequently revisited Munich conducting mostly the Italian repertory. Kempe's début at
440-508: Was motivated to make these changes in order to assert copyright over his work. Another source of controversy is Haas's affiliation with the Nazi party, of which he was a member and didn't hesitate or scruple to use the language of Nazism to garner approval for his work. He portrayed Bruckner as being a pure and simple country soul who had been corrupted by "cosmopolitan" and Jewish influences. This proved Haas's undoing: after World War II , he
462-788: Was permitted by the East German authorities to do so without severing his ties with Dresden. In 1953 Kempe appeared with the Munich company at the Royal Opera House in London , where the General Administrator, Sir David Webster , quickly decided that Kempe would be an ideal Music Director for Covent Garden. Kempe declined the appointment, and did not accept the top job at any opera house after leaving Munich in 1954. He nonetheless conducted frequently at Covent Garden and
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#1732772839577484-571: Was removed from the Bruckner project and replaced by the more scholarly, if less inventive, Leopold Nowak who went on to produce new editions of all Bruckner's symphonies, including use of the severely cut last (1892) version of the Eighth the composer was persuaded to promulgate for publication. Conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler criticized what he called Haas's "violation myth" in his private notebooks: "Only unproductive minds can seriously believe that
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