Reger, Max

[Mandryka]

I like lots of things by Reger -- Psalm 100, the op 72 violin and piano sonata, some of the string quartets, the clarinet quintet, the Hiller Variations, the Bocklin tone poem, the Romantic Suite.

But I have no understanding of the man, his life and passions, and his aesthetic ideas, what he was trying to do, his relation to modernity and to the past etc etc. There seems to be a real paucity of things to read in the two languages I can read in -- English and French.

I'll put a youtube in for those who are unfamiliar with his music - Herbert Blomstedt with the Hiller Variations.

[Pulcinella]

I think that some of his organ works probably featured in Noel Rawsthorne's Bank Holiday recitals at Liverpool cathedral that I went to, but I have no memory of them, so perhaps need to remedy that.

[smittims]

Reger had a high reputation in German-speaking countries for many years. I find his music hard-going. I feel I ought to be more impressed with it, and every now and then I listen to him . I suspect the problem is our old friend, lack of memorable , striking thematic ideas. Compare him with the works Stravinsky wrote at the same time...


...See what I mean?

[gurnemanz]

There was a Blomstedt thread a few years ago where I mentioned a programme in which he talks about Reger. Not sure how well that link works. I see I wrote the following the the time:

I recently watched a German TV programme via satellite called : Max Reger - Ein musikalischer Koloss in which the affable Herbert Blomstedt appears as one of Reger's most enthusiastic fans. Described as a superstar in his time, Reger is now largely out of fashion. Work obsessive and heavy drinker, he died aged 43.

The programme (seemingly not available but description here) got me onto some less-trodden Reger paths, especially vocal music. Well worth investigating are:

Choral:

Andrew-John Smith with Consortium, on Hyperion. https://www.prestomusic.com/classica...r-choral-music

Songs:

Sophie Bevan - Hyperion. https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDA68057

Markus Schäfer on NCA. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Max-Reger-M.../dp/B000OV14X2 (I see he's done a follow-up which appeared last year.)

Fischer-Dieskau in Orchestral Songs on Orfeo

[Serial_Apologist]

We have here, I think, an under-acknowleged transitional figure in Late Romantic Austro-German music - someone occupying a ready-made space concerned with expanding both its Brahmsian formal and Wagnerian expressive means to a point at which successors at given stages, including figures as diverse as Schmidt, Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Bartok, Szymanowsky, Schoeck and Hindemith, could initially ground their own diverse subsequent directions in the dress codes of Reger's rich aesthetic continuum. Elgar - indeed his lesser predecessor Parry - likewise equally indebted to the Wagner/Brahms inheritance - might have provided a similar model for British composers had not our own nationalist desiderata intervened to re-model the Holst/Vaughan Williams generation. But while in the latter we see other non-Germanic influences, especially from France, as would be the case for Bartok and Szymanowsky to name just two, there would seem no doubting that Reger exerted a determining influence on Schoenberg and his pupils - it can be audibly heard in Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony, the first two movements of the ground-shaking Second String Quartet, Berg's solitary Piano Sonata, and in Webern's pre-opus numbered Piano Quintet of 1907, and the unsettling Passacaglia Op 1.

Thus, even while some of the above-mentioned composers continued availing themselves of the technical and expressive means deriving from the Second Viennese school composers' free atonal phase, one is able to see that the latter could and would not have come about without singling out the prior influence of Max Reger, the main aspect of which lay in an expanded tonal-chromatic language coupled to proven methods of construction dating back to Bach by way of Brahms, in particular. However one should not overlook another aspect of the precise means by which Reger also expands the listening experience - namely by combining a harmonically expanded universe in which augmented triads play a part in configuring their surrounding contrapuntal fabric and elaboration in such a way as to frequently over-ride cadential resolution to the point of obliterating key definition, thus drawing the listener to transcend such matters, and thus to embrace future norms in which such needs, deeply ingrained in listening habits indebted to movements away from and eventually returning to what are in fact conventional diatonic prescriptive means. Once taken on board the germinating motifs and interwoven lines found in late Beethoven quartets along with the energy informing them can be understood as prophetic in previously unforseeable ways. It seems (to me at any rate) no accident that Reger once more becomes the explicit stylistic model for Schoenberg in the two reconstructions of late Baroque music, the Monn Cello Concerto and Handel Concerto Grosso, along with his own later tonal works, which one might feel along with Schoenberg would have been impossible without the implicit historical weight behind them represented by Reger, who saw such things as likewise conveyed in absolute musical terms as opposed to supported by extra-musical and/or subjective programmes, as in the cases of Strauss and Mahler.

All this might appear to boulster Reger's reputation for being heavyweight, even, some have accused, turgid. But aside from the arguable value of hearing added dimensions there was also the gentler, poetic side of Reger, as evinced particularly in his later works, even some of the late organ preludes and fugues which shed the apparent urge to out-Bach Bach in inflated grandiloquence found in the (near atonal) Fantasia and Fugue on the name of BACH of 1900. Here is the lovely Romantische Suite Op 125 of around 1915 as orchestrated in 1920 by Schoenberg. Note the almost Debussyian whole-tone harmonies near the start, which A.S. lovely treats as if saying "This is as close as I get in my nodding appreciation of the French master".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQiB3kn4CM4

[Mandryka]

We have here, I think, an under-acknowleged transitional figure in Late Romantic Austro-German music - someone occupying a ready-made space concerned with expanding both its Brahmsian formal and Wagnerian expressive means to a point at which successors at given stages, including figures as diverse as Schmidt, Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Bartok, Szymanowsky, Schoeck and Hindemith, could initially ground their own diverse subsequent directions in the dress codes of Reger's rich aesthetic continuum. Elgar - indeed his lesser predecessor Parry - likewise equally indebted to the Wagner/Brahms inheritance - might have provided a similar model for British composers had not our own nationalist desiderata intervened to re-model the Holst/Vaughan Williams generation. But while in the latter we see other non-Germanic influences, especially from France, as would be the case for Bartok and Szymanowsky to name just two, there would seem no doubting that Reger exerted a determining influence on Schoenberg and his pupils - it can be audibly heard in Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony, the first two movements of the ground-shaking Second String Quartet, Berg's solitary Piano Sonata, and in Webern's pre-opus numbered Piano Quintet of 1907, and the unsettling Passacaglia Op 1.

Thus, even while some of the above-mentioned composers continued availing themselves of the technical and expressive means deriving from the Second Viennese school composers' free atonal phase, one is able to see that the latter could and would not have come about without singling out the prior influence of Max Reger, the main aspect of which lay in an expanded tonal-chromatic language coupled to proven methods of construction dating back to Bach by way of Brahms, in particular. However one should not overlook another aspect of the precise means by which Reger also expands the listening experience - namely by combining a harmonically expanded universe in which augmented triads play a part in configuring their surrounding contrapuntal fabric and elaboration in such a way as to frequently over-ride cadential resolution to the point of obliterating key definition, thus drawing the listener to transcend such matters, and thus to embrace future norms in which such needs, deeply ingrained in listening habits indebted to movements away from and eventually returning to what are in fact conventional diatonic prescriptive means. Once taken on board the germinating motifs and interwoven lines found in late Beethoven quartets along with the energy informing them can be understood as prophetic in previously unforseeable ways. It seems (to me at any rate) no accident that Reger once more becomes the explicit stylistic model for Schoenberg in the two reconstructions of late Baroque music, the Monn Cello Concerto and Handel Concerto Grosso, along with his own later tonal works, which one might feel along with Schoenberg would have been impossible without the implicit historical weight behind them represented by Reger, who saw such things as likewise conveyed in absolute musical terms as opposed to supported by extra-musical and/or subjective programmes, as in the cases of Strauss and Mahler.

All this might appear to boulster Reger's reputation for being heavyweight, even, some have accused, turgid. But aside from the arguable value of hearing added dimensions there was also the gentler, poetic side of Reger, as evinced particularly in his later works, even some of the late organ preludes and fugues which shed the apparent urge to out-Bach Bach in inflated grandiloquence found in the (near atonal) Fantasia and Fugue on the name of BACH of 1900. Here is the lovely Romantische Suite Op 125 of around 1915 as orchestrated in 1920 by Schoenberg. Note the almost Debussyian whole-tone harmonies near the start, which A.S. lovely treats as if saying "This is as close as I get in my nodding appreciation of the French master".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQiB3kn4CM4

Any good things to read about him and/or his music in French or English?

[Serial_Apologist]

Any good things to read about him and/or his music in French or English?

None that I am aware of, Mandryka - and Google! (WIKI etc) came up with very little. Books on music I have (especially on 20th century music) offer little as well - usually mentioning him as in some ways a harbinger, in others a might-have-been in more propitious times or circumstances. My above message was the result of a lot of listening and comparison with other composers and trends contemporary with Reger on my part!

[Mandryka]

None that I am aware of, Mandryka - and Google! (WIKI etc) came up with very little. Books on music I have (especially on 20th century music) offer little as well - usually mentioning him as in some ways a harbinger, in others a might-have-been in more propitious times or circumstances. My above message was the result of a lot of listening and comparison with other composers and trends contemporary with Reger on my part!

The best I've managed to find is Musical Quarterly Vol. 87, No. 4, Winter, 2004, Special Issue: Max Reger which I could download from Jstor with my university alumni access.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/i282800

[Serial_Apologist]

The best I've managed to find is Musical Quarterly Vol. 87, No. 4, Winter, 2004, Special Issue: Max Reger which I could download from Jstor with my university alumni access.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/i282800

Thanks very much for downloading this, Mandryka: those article's opening pages are promising, Andrew Mead's especially tantalising as he appears to be on the point of launching into a more detailed analysis along the lines of what I was articulating in my own autodidactically clumsy way. "Historicist modernism" in Frisch's chapter translates as "modern classicism" for some comparatively recent writers in reference to Busoni, who iirc coined the term in relation to his own music composed around and after the First World War, though I should rightly check the source for accuracy. As a pre-1920 music designation it could also be applied to Prokofiev's "Classical Symphony", the series of sonatas HIndemith composed under his Op 11 between 1918 and 1920, possibly to the last works of Fauré too, as in contradistinction with the Neo Classicism of for examples Stravinsky's Piano Concerto and Sonata, Poulenc's Les Biches at a squeeze, and maybe even the first serial works of Schoenberg. Holst's Fugal Concerto of 1920 is in both senses remarkable as a stand out stand alone Neo Classical part-pastiche. I'd better stop myself there!

[Serial_Apologist]

I now see that the Romantic Suite to which I linked in my earlier post was in fact composed in 1911, or at any rate first performed in that year,

[Mandryka]

Been listening with great pleasure to

1. The three sacred motets, op 110 (very good contrapuntal textures)
2. The Balletten-Suite (this one sounds nothing like Reger!)
3 The clarinet sonatas (just gorgeous, warm and sensual)
4. The five duets op 14 (just gorgeous - very early.)

My overall impression is that there is no Reger style, there are many Reger styles. And of course he often defies the caricature, he isn't stodgy and solemn and cold.