The coincidence of the resignation of Pope Benedict and some work I have been doing on the former Joseph Ratzinger’s compatriot, the composer Max Reger (1873-1916) prompted me to reflect on the now-surprising fact that in 1902 Reger was excommunicated from the Catholic Church when he married a divorced Protestant. Reger could probably have done without the stress: he was already a troubled soul, given to drowning his sorrows – mostly the result of the effects of military service and professional frustration in his early years of being a ‘big fish’ talent-wise, in the ‘small pond’ of Germany’s Northern Palatinate, where he was born and grew up. After a breakdown, Reger returned to the family home in Weiden in 1898; there he recovered his nerve, continuing to perform and compose, to the point at which, in 1901, he was able to persuade his family to move to Munich where he expected more musical stimulation. Teaching and professional appointments followed, and he finished his career as Court music director in Meiningen and as a professor at the Royal Conservatoire of Leipzig – he died of heart failure at the age of 43, on one of his teaching journeys to Leipzig from his home in Jena. Reger’s best-known work to ‘civilians’ – by which I mean the general concert-going public – is the Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart; Reger was also prolific in chamber and choral music, but wrote no opera or symphonies. The reason I say ‘civilians’ is that the uninitiated could not be expected to know that it was Reger’s large corpus of organ music which silenced the naysayers and brought him to fame. He belonged to that generation of composers – Pfitzner, Busoni, Wolf-Ferrari, Schmidt and Zemlinsky – whose works were largely forgotten after WWII and but who have returned to prominence after the worst excesses of post-war musical iconoclasm were over. For Bach worshippers like me, Reger is the great Romantic bonus – the composer’s own reverence for Bach is expressed in re-imagined Fantasies, Toccatas, Fugues, Trios and Chorale Preludes; and in Brahms-influenced harmonic structures free-falling into limitless post-Wagnerian realms – but unlike post-Gurrelieder Schoenberg, staying broadly within tonality. Reger’s fecund complexity and penchant for harmonically tortuous cadences can act as a barrier to the uncommitted. But for true believers the logic of these contrapuntal machinations and scrunchy cadences is no empty rhetoric: it’s just so damned satisfying … And however dazzling the surface detail, with Reger, as with Wagner, there is often an underlying plan which, like an architect’s computer simulation, slowly reveals itself from the ground up, eventually disclosing a whole cathedral – in sound. The Fugatto label has embarked on an 8-volume, 16-CD survey of Reger’s complete organ works, played on organs which are tonally appropriate to the composer’s time. Four volumes are out now – if you’d like to dip your toes in the water, I’d recommend Vols 1 [Fugatto O41], and 3 [Fugatto O43] – the former includes four large-scale Fantasies and Fugues, and two books of hugely varied incidental pieces; and the latter contains six of his wonderfully complex and fulfilling Chorale Fantasies, and a series of chorale preludes. Performed with utter conviction and virtuoso technique by the Italian organist and Reger champion Roberto Marini, these are benchmark recordings in every way.
The Record Geijutsu (Japan - March 2013)
