The Bruckner Society of America
The Bruckner Society of America was founded in 1931 with the primary mission to promote appreciation of the life and music of Anton Bruckner in the United States., to be done through the publication of articles and essays and concert reviews, the promotion and production of concerts including Bruckner’s music, and the recognition of advocates by the presentation of an honorary medal. Publication of the Society’s journal Chord and Discord began in 1932, specializing in popular articles on the music of Bruckner and Mahler and its reception. Twenty-two issues of the journal were released through 1998. In 1932, the noted sculptor Julio Kilenyi produced the Bruckner Medal of Honor, and over the years the Society has awarded the Kilenyi Medal to over seventy internationally renowned conductors, musicologists, and performing organizations.
Since the re-establishment of the Society in 2009, the Society’s board of directors has met annually, and the awarding of the Kilenyi Medal of Honor has resumed. Other projects have included the digitizing of all past publications of the Society, translation of several important German essays from the 1930s, and the funding of several recording projects. Our latest initiative is the publication of this book, which addresses in detail the differing editions and versions of Bruckner’s eleven symphonies, the early overture, and the chamber music.
William Carragan
Bruckner scholars and enthusiasts have been aware at least from the 1930s that there are in the Austrian National Library and elsewhere manuscript sources for Bruckner’s symphonies and masses that differ rather widely from the publications of these works made during his lifetime. As new publications rapidly began to be made of these manuscript sources under the editorship of Robert Haas and Alfred Orel, it also emerged that the sources themselves embodied different versions of the symphonies, valid for different times and occasions, of which the already published editions represented the latest. It was Haas’s plan to publish a variety of these editions, and indeed he did publish two versions of the First and an alternative finale for the Fourth. After the war the directorship of the Collected Edition passed to Leopold Nowak, who began by re-checking Haas’s work and bringing out new editions of all the symphonies except the Second, which did not appear in the new series until 1965. Then in the 1970s early versions of three of the symphonies appeared, but again the Second was not among them. Eventually William Carragan was asked by Hofrat Nowak to edit the Second, which he did in two versions, those of 1872 and 1877, at Nowak’s request replacing the 1965 edition.
“… Professor Carragan approaches it with great perspicacity. … The result is a unique and enthralling picture of an exceptional musical mind at work across some three decades.”
William Carragan and John Berky talking about Bruckner’s Symphony no. 7 when it was conducted by Darwin Aquino in the Dominican Republic, 2011
Red Book Sightings
The Red Book at the East Coast Brucknerathon, Windsor, Connecticut, 2018, at the Bruckner Journal Readers’ Conference, Oxford, 2019, and at the Bruckner Geburtshaus, Ansfelden, 2019
