Max Reger (1) (1873–1916)

Reger, the son of a school teacher, was born in Brand, Germany on March 19, 1873. He began musical studies at a young age and by the age of fifteen was already composing in earnest. He was expected to become a school teacher like his father. However, before he took his first teaching job, he met the eminent musicologist Hugo Riemann, who was so impressed by Reger's talent that he urged him to devote himself entirely to music. Reger enrolled at the Sonderhausen Conservatory where he studied under Riemann; he then followed his teacher to Wiesbaden (where it is said his drinking habits began). After holding some minor posts, he became Music Director of the Leipzig University (1907) and Professor of composition at the Leipzig Conservatory - a post he retained to the end of his short life.

In his short lifetime, Reger wrote a vast quantity of music - often in large forms, and with opus numbers that encompassed groups of works, not just single compositions. His musical mind was that of a genius: being able to write music in almost any circumstances, and music that was often of great contrapuntal complexity.

According to one source, only three composers are known to have written down the music they first prepared in their head: Bach, Mozart, and Reger. The writing bored Mozart (as he complained to his father), while Reger simply could not find the time to write the music down. During the long nights in coaches and trains, on his way to concerts and back home, he found time to compose in his head. Sometimes he had several compositions ready to be written down, but he just hadn't found the time. He could promise his publishers a new work of so many bars, with specific instruments, for he knew this in advance of writing it down. Indeed, Reger is reported to have had conversations with people in the room while writing his music, which shows his enormous powers of concentration.

Reger wrote a vast quantity of music spanning several genres. Among choral compositions by Reger the eight Geistliche Gesänge are considered especially moving, but his choral works and songs are not commonly performed today. Reger enjoys a particularly high reputation among organists, to whose repertoire he made important contributions. Reger's organ music offers a considerable challenge to performers, and some works are said to have been composed as a challenge to his friend, the organist Karl Straube. Notable organ works include Chorale Fantasias on Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott, Op. 27, and other Lutheran chorale tunes. His compositions for organ include a Fantasia and Fugue on the name of Bach. Reger himself was a magnificent organist and an acknowledged master of improvisation on the organ. His spiritual predecessor was Johann Sebastian Bach, whose music Reger revered above all other. Reger was a firm supporter of 'absolute' music and saw himself in a tradition going back to Bach, through Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms. In his later piano music he pursued Brahms's continuous development and free modulation, often also invoking, like Brahms, counterpoint in the style of Bach. Many of his works are in variation and fugue forms; equally characteristic is a great energy and complexity of thematic growth.… (más)

Descendants of this romantic music are Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler and Claude Debussy. Together with Max Reger, Hans Pfitzner, Franz Schrecker, Scriabine and Sibelius they were the last champions of romanticism in our time.

The chromatic harmonies of Max Reger are an intensification of the Hugo Wolff chromatics; the tone is Brahms', the structure of the organ music the Bach form.

No contemporary composer could compare with Reger in abundance of genuine musical powers. Music deluged him. More than 300 songs, choral works, organ music, over 70 orchestral pieces, works for chamber music, piano pieces, small and large music forms, rushed down upon the composer and crowded his imagination. When Max Reger sat at his desk, enveloped in clouds of cigar smoke, his head must have hummed like a waterfall of music. So powerful was his tone memory that he wrote down, like a letter, the most complicated polyphonous works, such as the "Hundredth Psalm" with the gigantic double fugues and the choral enhancement at the end.

Between 1898 and 1901 the twelve greatest of Max Reger's organ works were published. The organ was almost too small for the mass of music that Reger invented for it, and yet only the organ was able to absorb the roaring and storming of this music fantasy. The chromatic harmonies blew through the pipes like a hurricane, and the organ's pedals created tempests of sound.

Reger always thought and created polyphonic. In his first songs, which were influenced by Schumann and Hugo Wolf, the piano accompaniment is already polyphonous; the piano compositions, descended from Brahms, have polyphonous middle parts. In composing sonatas for a violin, viola or 'cello he himself heard in a single voice many voices. His earliest orchestral work, the "Sinfonietta" resembles a garden wherein the beds are overgrown with creepers.

Max Reger heard music as motion of harmonies. These Reger harmonies are modern chromatics. In his music the classic harmonics dissolve, as they did in the music of all composers between 1890 and 1914. The solid structure of the classic system disappears. The key-notes are veiled, harmonies become fluid.

In 1904 Max Reger published a "modulation theory" that permits every transition, every omission of intersecting harmonies, every paraphrasing of the basic chords. True, the three pillars of classic harmonics still stand: the tonic triad, the triad of the fourth step and the triad of the fifth step; but they have become insignificant and no longer support the musical structure, they vanish behind Baroque ornaments that have become essentials.

In later orchestra works Reger also turned to French impressionism.

Max Reger's music fantasy was a rich Baroque, that was often overladen and excessive. Such an imagination is not easily brought into form. Simple thoughts and large patterns cannot be built upon changeable harmonies. The liquefied base carries only short motifs which Reger likes to disperse into still smaller particles.

One of these forms was the Bach fugue form, another the Beethovan pattern of variations. With these forms Reger had solidified his overflowing fantasy, and within them he created his greatest masterpieces: the "Telemann" variations and the "Beethoven variations," the "Bach variations," the organ passacaglia, the organ fugues, the choral preludes, and the fugues in string quartettes and in the sonorous 100th Psalm. The old classic forms provided Max Reger with a haven in which he sought protection from the storm.

There is something incongruous in Reger's music: an old form and new harmonious substance; rich harmonic and contrapuntal fancy and a form that does not grow out of this fantasy but is brought alongside it from without. All this is combined with Baroque excess, with a passionate exuberance and a genuine music mania.… (más)