When the Celebrity Series brings the Berlin Philharmonic to Boston Wednesday, the sound of the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” will ring out through Symphony Hall. Well, sort of. For the hit song’s incessantly repeating bass line, Jack White borrowed the main theme from Anton Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony—which is what the Berliners under music director Kirill Petrenko will actually be playing, in celebration of the great Austrian composer’s bicentennial. It’s the only work on the program, but no one who hears this 75-minute giant is likely to feel short-changed.

The Fifth had its premiere in Graz in 1894, under the baton of one of Bruckner’s former students, Franz Schalk. The program began with Beethoven’s Consecration of the House Overture, continued with the Bruckner symphony (in a shortened edition—more about that later), followed that with the Liszt E-flat Piano Concerto, and concluded with the prelude to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Just seven years later, Wilhelm Gericke conducted what was surely the American premiere, on a full Boston Symphony Orchestra bill with the Overture to Weber’s Der Freischütz, an arrangement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, and Brahms’s Opus 52 Liebeslieder Walzer.

But the BSO didn’t play the symphony again until 1959, when concertmaster and assistant conductor Richard Burgin led two performances in Boston and one in Providence. In both 1901 and 1959, the piece was offered during the Christmas season, as if it were holiday fare. Frederik Prausnitz led the Fifth in the 1960s with the NEC Symphony Orchestra; Lorin Maazel and the Cleveland Orchestra brought it to Symphony Hall in 1974; Leon Kirchner did it with his Harvard Chamber Orchestra in the 1980s. The BSO’s sole subsequent performances have been under Seiji Ozawa, who programmed the piece in 1976 and again in 1992, its most recent outing in Symphony Hall. Boston hasn’t heard the Fifth since Ben Zander did it with the Boston Philharmonic in 2007.

Even by the standard of a town that has never been Bruckner crazy, this constitutes unusual neglect. But No. 5 has always been a tough sell. Bruckner embarked on the symphony in 1875, finished it the following year, then revised it in 1877–78. It was, at that point, the longest symphony ever written. His first four symphonies were still struggling for acceptance, and he made no attempt to have the Fifth performed or published once he was satisfied with the revision.

In the 1880s, Bruckner’s fortunes improved, in part due to the efforts of Franz Schalk and Franz’s brother Josef, who together helped bring about the premiere of the Fourth Symphony in 1881 and the Seventh in 1884. In 1887, Josef Schalk and Franz Zottmann invited Bruckner to a surprise two-piano presentation of the Fifth they’d been preparing. They thought he’d be pleased. He was furious. He would need to attend every rehearsal, he said, if the piece were to be played properly. The performance was postponed; it took place only after many bad-tempered rehearsals and was in the end a success, but Bruckner had made it clear he wasn’t keen to leave interpretation of his work to others.  

The Schalks and Ferdinand Löwe went on to work with Bruckner on revisions of his Third and Fourth Symphonies, versions that the composer appears to have accepted and that he saw into publication. The Fifth also saw revision, but in this case without Bruckner’s input. In 1892, Franz, who was then kapellmeister in Graz, proposed to give the symphony its orchestral premiere. Bruckner had by that time had the manuscript copied and orchestral parts made, and he sent them on to Franz. Franz, however, had no intention of using them, since he intended to make a revision of his own. Franz and Josef did not want Bruckner to know the details of what Franz was doing, for fear he would object, just as he had in 1887. They did want him to attend the premiere, believing that once he heard the result of Franz’s efforts, he would surely approve. By 1894, though, Bruckner was too ill to attend the event, which was a modest success. Franz’s version was published in 1896, shortly before Bruckner’s death; it’s doubtful the composer ever saw a copy.

Some of Franz’s adjustments are in line with what Bruckner seems to have accepted for the Fourth: blending of strings and winds, reduced contrast, smoother articulation, toned-down dynamics. Many adjustments, however, sound distinctly un-Brucknerian, like the pounding timpani and added cymbals, and the substitution of a B-flat-major chords for the original austere unison B-flat in the final bars. It’s also hard to think the composer would have approved Franz’s cutting 244 bars from the Scherzo’s reprise and 122 bars from the Finale. Still, for the first quarter of the 20th century, Franz’s was the version known to concert audiences. It’s the one the BSO played in 1901, the one former Bruckner student Gustav Mahler led (albeit with further alterations and cuts), the one Jean Sibelius said “moved me to tears.”

Then in the late 1920s, the Internationale Bruckner-Gesellschaft was founded in Vienna. The IBG chose for its “most important task” the publication of the composer’s oeuvre, promising to “purify Bruckner’s works from all blemishes and mistakes and produce an Urtext that will serve as the basis for future practical editions.” In practice, under the editorship of Nazi Party member Robert Haas, this meant Urtext editions cleansed of all external influence, as if Bruckner’s divine inspiration were not to be sullied by contact with mere mortals—some of whom, it was implied, were Jewish.

In fact, we now know that much of Bruckner’s revising was done on his own initiative, and if, like other composers, he entertained suggestions from colleagues and conductors (including Johann Herbeck, Hermann Levi, and Arthur Nikisch as well as the Schalks and Löwe), he was selective about which ones he implemented. Whether his revisions—which ran from the mid 1870s into the 1890s—made the symphonies better is still hotly debated. But the later versions were more acceptable to Viennese audiences, and they would be the concert norm for the next 40 years. Then, for the most part, they were displaced by the “purer” editions of Haas and his successor, Leopold Nowak.

Haas’s edition of the Fifth, based on Bruckner’s manuscript, appeared in 1935; later that year, the symphony was heard for the first time in the form the composer left it. In 1937, Hitler opened the Nürnberg Party Congress with a performance of the double fugue from the Fifth’s Finale, and Karl Böhm made the premiere recording of Haas’s edition with the Staatskapelle Dresden.

Thereafter, Haas’s edition (or Nowak’s similar subsequent one) was the version of the Fifth that audiences almost invariably heard. In 1959, BSO audiences might have been surprised to find Richard Burgin choosing to give them the Schalk revision. Then again, they might not: no American orchestra had yet recorded the Fifth (only three have since), and recordings from abroad were few and mostly obscure. In 1959, many BSO patrons were surely hearing the symphony for the first time.

Two extensive program-book articles—one unsigned, the other by John N. Burk—supported Burgin’s decision. The first concluded, “Conductors today are divided in their choice. They may act quite irreproachably according to their personal sense of Brucknerian fidelity, their taste and the taste of their time. Mr. Burgin has made use of the shorter, the revised and first printed edition.”

The author did not, however, submit evidence that Bruckner had anything to do with Franz Schalk’s revision of the Fifth. A “personal sense of Brucknerian fidelity” that preferred Schalk’s revision to Bruckner’s original would be based in the conviction that Schalk’s sensibility was superior to Bruckner’s. What’s more, in 1959, conductors were not really “divided in their choice” of versions. Hans Knappertsbusch did continue to perform Bruckner’s symphonies in the editions with which he had grown up and was familiar. Pretty much everyone else opted for the original Fifth.       

Then in 1998, Bard College president Leon Botstein recorded the Schalk edition with the London Philharmonic. Botstein’s booklet note contended, “there can be little doubt that this is an authentic version with claims to authorial intention” (whatever that means) and noted that the relative shortness of the Schalk has “the practical virtue of making it easier to include in conventional symphony orchestra programs.” That was true of Burgin’s Boston performances: with the Fifth running just 51 minutes, there was room for an audience favorite, the Mussorgsky/Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition, after intermission.

In a second note, current Bruckner Society of America president Benjamin Korstvedt suggested that Schalk recast the orchestration throughout “so as to clarify the textures and shape the music more dynamically,” and he termed Schalk’s deletion of 122 bars from the Finale a “strategic removal.” The result, he argued, made the score “more amenable to performance.”

Schalk’s easier-listening Fifth may well be what Viennese audiences of the 19^th century and European audiences of the early 20^th needed to hear. But today’s music lovers are made of sterner stuff, as the 70-plus conductors who have recorded Bruckner’s original since 1959 can attest. The Schalk edition hasn’t been heard in Boston since Burgin did it; on Wednesday, Petrenko and the Berliners, like almost everyone else who programs the Fifth these days, will be doing the original version.

The original, however, is problematic in that, like most of Bruckner’s work, it has no metronome marks and few performance indications. At first, of course, Bruckner was conducting his symphonies himself. Later, we can see that he expected prestigious conductors like Nikisch and Hans Richter would know what to do. Prior to the premiere of the Seventh, he wrote to Nikisch saying that in the finale, “frequent changes of tempo would be required. With a gifted conductor like you in charge, all of this will no doubt happen anyway.” He subsequently reminded Nikisch that “in the score many important and also frequent tempo changes are not marked.”

Schalk took these words to heart. One can look askance at his reorchestration of the Fifth and the cuts he made, but when he added tempo changes and performance indications to the bare bones of the symphony’s manuscript, he was doing no more than Bruckner had asked of Nikisch. He was, like Nikisch, a gifted conductor; if he went his own way to some degree, his taste was still the taste of the time, and Bruckner was familiar with it.

Petrenko confirmed this during a zoom press conference last week. “Of course I studied Schalk’s score, very carefully,” he replied when I asked whether he found Schalk helpful. “He wanted success for his teacher, he admired Bruckner. He made cuts that destroyed the architecture of the symphony.

“But I’m not looking at his version in just a negative way. He was a brilliant musician. What he wrote in, some tempo marks, some things for the conductor, those are still what we are doing now, without acknowledging him. Some of the tradition that we still have in this symphony is Schalk tradition. Also, for me, it is important to know what he changed from the original, in order to know what I can integrate into my interpretation and where I really need to follow Bruckner’s original.”

Bruckner never heard his Fifth. On Wednesday, Symphony Hall will hear it for the first time in 32 years. We can be grateful to Petrenko and the Berliners for bringing it back.

Jeffrey Gantz has been writing about music, dance, theater, art, film, and books for the past 45 years, first for the Boston Phoenix and currently for the Boston Globe.