I'm going to make the most controversial claim I've ever made on this page. Hang onto your hats....
Bruckner's greatest work, his finest achievement, the supreme and strangest manifestation of his genius, is the first, 1887, draft of his Eighth Symphony. It's the only work Bruckner ever wrote in which he was fully confident of his abilities, and the only work in which he wrung out every last drop of his inspiration without worrying what others think. The 1887 B8 is Bruckner in his truest Brucknerness, hanging out his strange obsessive mystical passions for all to see. Bruckner 8 in any version is towering, but the much more common Bruckner 8 revision has the sanctimony of a sacred monolith about it - its greater orderliness turns some of it into generic Wagnerian rhetoric. But Bruckner 8's first go-round sounds like no other composer - its harmonies modernly Austrian yet immemorially Christian, its form symphonic yet haphazard as a Lisztian poem. Its disorder endows it an unpredictability which the Bruckner 8 we think we know never has.
We still haven't caught up with it. Bruckner sent the draft to Hermann Levi, Levi had no idea what to make of it, and Bruckner, who thought his days of rejection were finally over, became so traumatized that he felt a compulsion to revise literally every symphony he ever wrote before he could truly undertake a new one, and thus we never even got a full Ninth.
I'm generally of the opinion that Bruckner's earlier thoughts are better, not because I prefer disorganization, but because Bruckner used his revisions to make his works more traditionally coherent - occasionally by the use of cliches. But even in their revisions, there's very little about Bruckner that's coherent. Like a cathedral labyrinth, the very point of his works is that they meander in every direction, obsessively exploring every symphonic crevice. What makes Bruckner Bruckner is his bizarre obsessions, and his complete inability to wrest himself from their grip on his mind. Bruckner, like obsessions, is not supposed to make sense, and the more coherent the obsessions seem, the less individuated they are.
Bruckner 8th's first draft is the deepest Bruckner ever musically trod into his own strange mind. It has the formal ambition of the 5th, the harmonic daring of the 6th, and the ninth's dread of mortality and hellfire. It is As towering as I find the 5th, the 1887 8 was written to be his magnum opus, and that is exactly what it is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyggJTQAXiQ
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