Max Reger

Max Reger set himself a task no one else in his generation would attempt: to be Johann Sebastian Bach reborn into the twentieth century. He poured the densest, most chromatic harmony of late Romanticism into the oldest and strictest forms — the chorale fantasia, the passacaglia, the fugue, the variation set — and produced an organ literature that is the largest and most demanding since Bach himself, alongside a body of piano music that carries the inheritance of Brahms into the modern age. He worked at frightening speed, drank and smoked himself toward an early grave, and died at forty-three with the catalogue already past Op. 140. For the organ above all, he is the indispensable bridge between the Baroque and the present.

He was born on 19 March 1873 at Brand, a village in the Bavarian Upper Palatinate (Oberpfalz), the son of a schoolteacher. The family soon moved the few miles to Weiden, the small market town that would be the setting for his childhood and, later, for the most concentrated burst of creation in his life. His father played several instruments and taught him the rudiments; the decisive early figure, though, was a local schoolmaster and organist named Adalbert Lindner, who took the boy in hand, drilled him in Bach, and — half a century on — wrote one of the principal accounts we have of Reger’s youth.

The turning point came in 1888, when the fifteen-year-old made a pilgrimage to Bayreuth, heard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger and Parsifal, and came home certain that he would be a musician rather than a schoolteacher. Two years later he sent some manuscripts to the theorist Hugo Riemann — the most formidable musical mind in Germany, the man whose textbooks defined how a generation understood harmony — who accepted him as a pupil. Reger followed Riemann to the Wiesbaden Conservatory in 1890 and stayed in the Rhineland through the middle of the decade, studying, teaching piano and organ, and absorbing from Riemann a rigor of voice-leading and formal logic that never left him.

Weiden: the organ explosion

Wiesbaden ended badly. Military service, overwork and heavy drinking brought on a physical and nervous collapse, and in 1898 Reger went home to his parents in Weiden to recover. What looked like defeat became the most extraordinary creative period of his life. Living quietly in a provincial town, with no orchestra and not even a large organ at hand, the twenty-five-year-old produced in three or four years the works that founded the modern organ repertoire.

The chorale fantasias are the heart of it. The fantasia on “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott,” Op. 27 (1898) made his reputation. Lindner watched him write it — the first pages, he says, completed in a single evening — and recorded Reger’s “royal delight” in the third verse, Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel wär’ (“and were the world all devils o’er”), where the chorale rings out “with tremendous energy in the pedal, while the voices of this world rage against it in the manual with relentlessly sharp dissonances” (Eugen Segnitz, 1922). The pair of fantasias of Op. 40 followed in 1899, and the three of Op. 52 — on Alle Menschen müssen sterben, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme and a Hallelujah — in 1901. Of these last Lindner left a telling story: stung by a review that denied he had any imagination, Reger dashed off all three in roughly ten days and threw the finished manuscripts onto the piano with the bitter words, “There you have the Reger who has no fantasy and no invention” (Adalbert Lindner, 1922).

The summit of the Weiden years is the Fantasy and Fugue on B-A-C-H, Op. 46 (1900), built entirely on the four notes that spell Bach’s name in German nomenclature — B♭, A, C, B♮. Reger dedicated it to his old Munich-era teacher Josef Rheinberger, who is said to have shaken his head over its harmonic boldness; Reger meant it, Lindner wrote, as “a Gothic cathedral” raised in homage to Bach. Lindner remembered being “startled” by the “cyclopean force” of the opening when Reger first played it through on the piano. Through all of it ran a single conviction, which Reger stated as plainly as anything he ever said:

Sebastian Bach is for me the beginning and end of all music; every true progress in music rests and is founded upon him.

— Max Reger, replying to a survey in the journal Die Musik, 1905

Carrying these works to the public was almost single-handedly the achievement of one man: the organist Karl Straube, who from 1898 became Reger’s tireless champion, premiering the “Ein feste Burg” fantasia at the cathedral in Wesel in September that year and going on to give the first performances of nearly all the major organ scores. Without Straube’s advocacy — and his willingness to wrestle music that frightened other players — Reger’s organ output might have sat unheard on the page.

Munich, the pianist, and the critics

In 1901 Reger moved to Munich, and the provincial recluse became a public figure — composer, teacher, and a touring concert pianist of real power. The Munich years brought the great keyboard music. The Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Bach, Op. 81 (1904), fourteen variations and a closing fugue on a theme from a Bach cantata, is his most ambitious piano work; Segnitz judged that “after Brahms’s variations on a Handel theme, these were the first great concert work of their kind,” and they passed straight into the recital repertoire — though Reger conceded the piece had outgrown even his own pianism. In a lighter vein, the four volumes of Aus meinem Tagebuch (“From my Diary”), Op. 82, begun in 1904, are small, intimate pieces that, Segnitz noted, “quickly conquered the widest circles” of music lovers.

Munich also brought the critics, who found Reger’s teeming chromaticism either prophetic or simply ugly, and with whom he fought back in kind. The most famous remark attributed to him in all of music history dates from a Munich review of 1906 by the critic Rudolf Louis — a reply Reger is said to have sent by postcard:

I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me.

— famously attributed to Max Reger, in answer to the critic Rudolf Louis, 1906

Leipzig and Meiningen

Reger’s restless career now moved fast. In 1907 he was appointed professor of composition at the Royal Conservatory in Leipzig — the city of Bach and of Mendelssohn’s old conservatory — and briefly served as musical director of the university church. Leipzig became his home base for the rest of his life and the seat of a celebrated teaching practice; pupils came to him from across Europe, and Straube, now organist of the Thomaskirche, anchored a whole “Reger school” of organ playing in the city.

In 1911 Duke George II of Saxe-Meiningen made him Hofkapellmeister of the famous Meiningen court orchestra — the disciplined ensemble that Hans von Bülow had built and that Brahms had loved. For three seasons Reger drove himself through exhausting conducting tours, championing the music he revered, before resigning the post in 1914 as his health failed and war broke out. The Meiningen years confirmed him as one of the leading musicians of the German Empire, honoured with a doctorate from the University of Jena and crowded with commissions.

The late style, Jena, and the end

In 1915 Reger settled in Jena, commuting weekly to Leipzig to teach. The music of these last years grew leaner and clearer — the so-called “free Jena style” — as if, having proved he could pile harmony higher than anyone alive, he no longer needed to. Two large works frame the turn. The Introduction, Passacaglia and Fugue, Op. 127 (1913), dedicated to Straube, was premiered by him in October 1913 at the inauguration of the great Sauer organ in the Centennial Hall (Jahrhunderthalle) at Breslau — a virtuoso organ summit, by turns, in Segnitz’s words, of “powerful force” and “mystical shimmer.” And the Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Telemann, Op. 134 (1914), twenty-three variations of mostly bright, humorous cast, was the grand piano work admirers had been asking him for. Reger announced it to Lindner on a postcard with characteristic glee: “There you have the grand piano work from me that you wished for!” (Max Reger, 1914).

He did not live to develop the new manner. On 11 May 1916, on a working visit to Leipzig, Reger died in his hotel of a heart attack, aged only forty-three — the proofs of his latest music, by the usual account, still beside him. He had compressed into a single short life a catalogue that runs to well over two hundred opus numbers.

Legacy

What Reger handed on was, above all, the survival of counterpoint. At a moment when music was breaking toward the dissolution of tonality on one side and folk-rooted nationalism on the other, he insisted that the fugue, the passacaglia and the chorale fantasia still had everything to say — that the line running from Bach through Mendelssohn and Brahms was not exhausted but inexhaustible. His organ works remain the central Romantic repertoire for the instrument, the natural successors to Liszt’s organ monuments and the German counterpart to César Franck’s; his pupils and Straube’s organ school carried his manner deep into the twentieth century, where it shaped composers from Hindemith to the organ-symphonists who came after. For Robert Schumann’s dream of a music both learned and deeply felt, and for Brahms’s marriage of Baroque rigor and Romantic warmth, Reger was the last and most prodigal heir.