Max Reger
born Brand, Bavaria, March 19, 1873; died Leipzig, May 11, 1916
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German composer, organist and pianist, editor, and writer on music.
Career Summary
Reger was a composition pupil of Hugo Riemann from 1890 and later the latter's teaching assistant in Wiesbaden. After a period working at the Munich Conservatory, he was appointed music director and teacher of music theory with the title of Royal Saxon Professor at Leipzig University in 1907. Having been grounded in Riemann's theory books himself, his teaching of harmony there was based on Riemann's theory of harmonic function. In addition to teaching, he gave concert tours throughout Europe, and was conductor of the court orchestra at Meiningen (1911–13).
Reger was a prodigious composer, in his day widely known, with a large output of orchestral, sacred choral, chamber, solo vocal, piano, and organ works (committed to "abstract" music, he wrote no stage works), all produced in the space of some twenty-six years. He also edited and arranged a broad range of music, notably much by J. S. Bach, and wrote one theoretical work: Beiträge zur Modulationslehre (Leipzig: Kahnt, 1903).
Reger and Schenker
Reger was the frequent object of Schenker's criticism throughout much of the latter's life. Of the Beiträge zur Modulationslehre, which was published at the time Schenker was formulating his own "Das Tonsystem," the precursor to his Harmonielehre, Schenker wrote in his diary in 1907: a small work that nothing in the world can excuse: limited, sloppily done; foolishly complacent and childish: and yet nevertheless the author was appointed professor of theory at the Conservatory in Munich, and has even just now become music director at the University of Leipzig. (OJ 1/3, p. 8d = 1/4, p. 11b)
But already before that, Schenker had had Reger in his sights. Reger is the first contemporary composer to be criticized in his Harmonielehre (1906). Spanning seven pages is a footnote presenting in score an excerpt from Reger's String Quintet, Op. 64, with the annotation: As a deterrent example, I give here the opening of the Quintet Op. 64 of a modern composer. This opening is by far the most supple passage in the first movement, what comes after that is many, many degrees more confused. But I ask: Do we really hear C minor, or is it not perhaps E-flat major? In particular, what do measures 6–8 signify, in themselves, and in the context of the whole? [. . .] One can only ask: What is this succession of scale-steps trying to say? Where is it coming from, where is it going to? [. . .] What is the solution to this problem? There isn't one. There isn't a passage in the work that informs us as to the principal key. [. . .] There is no logic to the keys, no logic to the apparent keys – just merely one big, singular, irrational on-going mass. And in German lands, people are seriously getting ready to celebrate this composer, devoid as he is of all musical instincts, as a "master of composition." – Just a few years after the death of Brahms – Oh what indolence on the part of the German public, what cowardliness on that of writers about music and the powers that be in the musical world! (pp. 220–226, omitted from English transl.)
In June 1911, writing about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Schenker remarked: What comes to mind is, for example, Reger's insipid way of writing: with Reger, chord after chord, unmanifested (unerwiesen) by any sort of motive, the chord progression in consequence operating only externally. What is unmanifested is constantly merely dumped at the first portals of our consciousness. Only that which is manifested is capable of penetratating into the depths. It is just the same with Rilke [. . .] (OJ 1/10, p. 134)
In similar vein, Schenker wrote in 1925 of the "lifelessness of a progresssion [in Reger's Beiträge] dreamed up from an exercise-book and derived from unelaborated (unauskomponiert) chords" (Meisterwerk, vol. II, pp. 190–91, Eng. transl., p. 117). At Reger's death, Schenker wrote in his diary: The obituaries of Reger declare almost unanimously that he was an inheritor of the legacy of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. If so, then Reger must have been three times richer than each of the other named masters individually – whereas in truth he was infinitely smaller, indeed never once came close to those masters. (OJ 2/2, p. 246)
Schenker's most sustained attack on Reger's music came in Das Meisterwerk in der Musik, vol. II (1925), in the essay "A Counter-Example: Max Reger's Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Bach, Op. 81, for piano," in which Schenker analyzes Bach's theme and each of Reger's fourteen variations and fugue in turn, concluding: That a poor compositional technique like Reger's is not a true polyphony surely needs no further proof. And if Reger had written in a hundred more voices, his writing would never have become polyphonic, for that requires an organic treatment of the voices. Still less can his style claim to be complex, [. . .] for all complexity presupposes, at the least, coherence. (p. 192; Eng. transl., p. 117)
Sources:
- MGG
- NGDM
- Federhofer, Hellmut, Heinrich Schenker nach Tagebüchern und Briefen ... (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1985), pp. 246–7, 292
- Das Meisterwerk in der Musik, vol. II (Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1925), p. 173–92; Eng. transl. by John Rothgeb (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 106–17
Contributor:
- Ian Bent