History and Max Reger
2004; Oxford University Press; Volume: 87; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/musqtl/gdh029
ISSN1741-8399
Autores ResumoThis issue of MQ is devoted to the career and work of Max Reger, who was born in 1873 and died in 1916, a couple of months after his forty-third birthday.Despite obesity and a legendary capacity for drink, his death was regarded as an unexpected tragedy.It was a blow to the future of music, particularly in German-speaking Europe, where it served as yet another case of a brilliant talent dying too soon.Indeed, Reger's age at death can be compared with the cases of Mozart and Schubert.In the early twentieth century, forty-three was considered as young as the early thirties had seemed a century earlier.A similar sense of a premature and historically potent loss had been generated five years earlier when Reger's contemporary, Gustav Mahler, died at age fifty.Despite the brevity of Reger's career, he was, as all commentators have noted, prodigious in output.Furthermore, he was, more so than Mahler or Richard Strauss, his better known but older contemporaries, explicitly and conventionally patriotic.Likewise, he was more inclined to a conventional construct of religion, particularly with respect to music.Reger's output includes many settings of sacred texts for chorus and voice, as well as organ music.His wife, Elsa, was Protestant and he himself Catholic, a circumstance that permitted him to keep contact with both traditions.These factors only underscored how closely Reger's music and the contemporary critical reception were intertwined with a wider fin-de-siècle debate over the direction of German culture in the context of the new German Empire and its success.This was less the case even with Strauss, and certainly with Mahler.Strauss had been viewed as an enfant terrible before World War I and was at one and the same time a source of German pride and cultural arrogance and yet an aggressive atheist (in the spirit of Nietzsche), ironist, apolitical individualist, and modernist.Reger may have shared with Strauss a love of German romantic poetry, including Eichendorff and Hölderlin, but Nietzsche did not figure into Reger's intellectual development.Nietzsche had been crucial to the young Mahler, who later in life turned away from this philosophy and back to early romantic sources and ultimately to a nearly mystic spirituality.But the connection between Mahler and the construction of German cultural
Referência(s)