Symphonie Nr. 1 c-moll

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.