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Max Reger Introduces Atonal Expressionism

2004; Oxford University Press; Volume: 87; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/musqtl/gdh027

1741-8399

Dan Harrison,

Musicology and Musical Analysis

One of the central myths of Reger reception is how, unbidden, the young composer sent Johannes Brahms his Organ Suite, op. 16-dedicated dem Manen J. S. Bach's-and received encouragement and support from the older master, leading eventually to an exchange of postcards with photographs.1 This well-mannered, middle-class exchange is reminiscent of the more passionate Weihekuss bestowed upon the forehead of the young Liszt from another older master, Beethoven. Both appear to have served the same legitimizing purpose in the respective mythologies: the master anoints a successor. For Reger, the exchange with Brahms could be seen as a confirmation of his calling to translate the living spirits (the manaes, or Roman household gods) of both Bach and Brahms into a new syncretion and (as Arnold Schoenberg noted) venerate it with the compositional liturgy of the Liszt-Wagner cult. Yet the summoning of this new god and living in covenant with it were, for Max Reger, crossed with those personal devils of the desacralized, modern life-alcoholism, drug dependency, obesity, mental illness-joined by their more covert familiarsworkaholism, bourgeois consumerism in its early stages, and a certain boorish, pre-Great War behavior now remembered chiefly in the person of the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, a famously nervos politician. From this perspective, a genre in Reger's large output, rare but significant, seems frequently to translate the demons before the gods. He quarantined these works with a specific title, Introduction, a rare phrase for a German that has precedent in the works of neither Bach nor Brahms; even Wagner chose Einleitung as a matter of habit.2 To introduce you to Max Reger in the way that he obviously wanted, consider Example 1. Certainly the oddest feature of a work that was deemed ultra-progressive in 1903 is its designated instrument: the organ, representing the living spirit of J. S. Bach. But the nature of the musical expression (even if judged by so superficial a measure as the formidable visual impression of the score) seems perhaps to be that of Erik, the mad phantom organist of the opera: murderer, freak, psycho. And on this point we meet up with Liszt, whose own organ works sketch the type in, for instance, the BACH Fantasia and the Weinen, Klagen variations.