Radio: Reger Reshaped Past

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31115, 19 July 1966, Page 9

Radio: Reger Reshaped Past

There are few signs yet of a revival of interest in the music of Max Reger, although there are some special broadcasts such as that from 3YC tomorrow evening to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death.

History admits Reger’s importance, writes the music critic of “The Times.” He exerted influence on two very different major composers, Hindemith in north Germany, and Schoenberg in Vienna. It might be argued that twentieth-century neo-classi-cism, the Back-to-Bach movement among composers, derives from Reger, who always pinned his creative faith on Bach, calling him “the beginning and end of ail music.” The curious and rather disconcerting feature of his life is that he set himself up as a progressive composer—and

won continual discredit as such from German critics—but very soon afterwards he was recognised as a traditionalist.

Like Richard Strauss and Schoenberg, Reger’s debt was equally, and unfashionably, to Brahms as well as Wagner. But unlike any of his contemporaries he based his style deliberately on the teutonic baroque counterpoint of Bach, and the hallmark of his style is a creative reinterpretation of Bach’s methods along romantically expressive lines. A Bach-nurtured generation may find this trait sympathetic.

addiction to fugue His veneration of Bach is most obviously to be found in his organ works, 216 in number but also in his addiction to fugue in all his compositions. He was a renowned contrapuntist, and almost automatically ended his bigger works with a gigantic fugue—witness the Mozart Variations for orchestra, the setting of “Psalm 100,” and the other, occasionally performed Hiller, Beethoven,

Bach, and Tetemann sets of variations. His devotion in life to the figure and example of Beethoven may lead us to ally him with late Beethoven in his predilection for the two forms of variation and fugue, and certainly he created marvellous specimens of these forms, brilliantly constructed, eminently dramatic. One cannot say lucid in texture—Reger’s love of thematic interworking, simply for the love of making ideas react upon one another, often complicates his demands upon a listener (let alone a performer). The texture becomes thicker, the thread of argument is clouded, and the phrases have a squareness that breaks up the flow of the musical discussion. But the argument is there, if on® is willing to follow it, and for the pianist there are substantial rewards in trying to recapture the essence of Reger’s own amply-clothed keyboard style. The piano variations need a Lisztian technique (but a cooler approach than is relevant to the Liszt of, say, the Paganini studies), and in their tranquil episodes a Franckian warmth allied to a Bachian clarity—Reger’s ideal eventually turned towards Mozart, and he declared that any good composition would make its effect in a performance devoid of colour, because “one has to learn to draw before one can paint.” This is a twentieth-century point of view, as is Reger’s fundamental tenet that music is about notes and phrases, not about extra-musical emotions.

When in 1911, he took charge of the Meiningen Orchestra, he began to dabble in associative music so as to widen his creative range and his Ballet Suite, op. 130, portrays Commedia del’ Arte characters in quite a lightmusical fashion; the Columbine movement sounds almost like an early Schoenberg morsel of film-music, and the waltz rather self-consciously

sidles round the ballroom floor.

A PROLIFIC OUTPUT Reger’s facility for compo-

sition was clearly enormous; his 140 odd list of works omits many youthful pieces and gathers handfuls into a single opus number. The ideas mattered little to him so long as he could manipulate them interestingly for his own personal pleas-

ure. He was, to fact, a private composer. As such he will never be popular. His historical position, small perhaps, is assured. Musicians cannot help liking what he does with music, and the lay public may well come to fancy the voluptuous, outspoken, solid fashion in which he reshaped the past for his own pleasure.