Robert Haas (musicologist)

Writing for the Cambridge University Press, Benjamin Korstvedt charges that in the Second, Seventh and Eighth symphonies Haas made changes to Bruckner's musical texts that "went beyond the limits of scholarly responsibility".

[1] Haas thus produced a text of the symphony, however laudable on its own merits, that didn't happen to correspond to anything ever written or approved by Bruckner.

[2] Another source of controversy is Haas's affiliation with the Nazi party, of which he was a member and didn't hesitate or scruple to use the language of Nazism to garner approval for his work.

[citation needed] This proved Haas's undoing: after World War II, he was removed from the Bruckner project and replaced by the more scholarly, if less inventive, Leopold Nowak who went on to produce new editions of all Bruckner's symphonies, including use of the severely cut last (1892) version of the Eighth the composer was persuaded to promulgate for publication.

Conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler criticized what he called Haas's "violation myth" in his private notebooks: "Only unproductive minds can seriously believe that a great productive artist [i.e., Bruckner] can be 'put under pressure' for the duration of a depression.