Symphony No. 1 in C minor

Bruckner later dubbed his First Symphony 'das kecke Beserl' (Austrian slang, roughly 'brazen little minx'), aptly capturing the high-spirited aspects of the work, which was composed shoulder-to-shoulder with the three great masses. The audience at the first performance, conducted by Bruckner in Linz in 1868, were amazed at the wealth of unprecedented musical material, but their reaction was generally positive. Until Robert Haas published the 'Linz Version' in 1935 in the old Bruckner Complete Edition, later generations only knew the First in Bruckner's revision of 1890/91.

It is a fact that Anton Bruckner composed a number of his works several times over; the First, the Second, the Third, the Fourth and the Eighth all exist in two or even three fundamentally different manuscript scores, and it is not just a matter of 'different readings' or 'improvements' made to individual passages (which could after all be incorporated into a critical report), but rather of quite independent treatments and developments of what is in most cases the same thematic material.

Bruckner at first conceived the slow movement of the First in classical sonata form with development, but for the Linz version he finally decided in favour of a three-part structure with an elaborately composed middle section. The autograph of the original Adagio (now in the Music Collection of the Austrian National Library), still without trumpets or trombones, breaks off at bar 154 in the recapitulation of the second subject. One sheet of the score still exists from the close of the movement (from bar 12 of the recapitulation of the second subject) using trumpets and trombones, thus representing a transitional stage between the original Adagio and that of the Linz version.

The last score page of the first Scherzo and Trio is inscribed 'München 25. Mai 1865' – at the time Bruckner was in Munich for the first performance of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. For the Linz version he wrote a completely new Scherzo, but kept the Trio unchanged.

On November 7 1891, Bruckner was awarded an honorary doctorate of the University of Vienna. He clearly set great store by this honour paid to his work 'as a symphonist'; in gratitude he dedicated his First Symphony, which he had finished revising some months before quite independently of the honorary doctorate, to the University Senate.

For performance purposes, the missing bars of the original slow movement of the First Symphony have been filled in by Wolfgang Grandjean using the corresponding musical material from the Linz version. Performance material for this preliminary Adagio and for the Scherzo which Bruckner later rejected (together with the Trio) are available from Doblinger.