The copies of most of Max Reger's compositions are ornamented with a
cover design representing Beethoven's death-mask wreathed with laurel.
It was in all sincerity that his publishers placed that decoration
there. For there was a moment when Reger excited high hopes. At the time
when he appeared, the cause of "absolute" music seemed lost. Musical
modernity and the programmatic form had come to seem inseparable. The
old classical forms were being supplanted by those of Wagner, Liszt and
Strauss. Not that there was a paucity of bespectacled doctors of music
who felt themselves called to compose "classical" works. But the content
of their work was invariably formal. Reger, however, seemed able to
effect a union between the modern spirit and the forms employed by the
masters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He, the troubled,
nervous, modern man, wrote with fluency fugues and double fugues,
chaconnes and passacaglie, concerti grossi and variations. He seemed to
have mastered the secrets of the old composers, to be continuing their
work, developing their thought and style. He excelled in the control of
what appeared to be the technicalities of composition. Had he not, in
his "Contributions to the Theory of Harmony," proposed one hundred
examples of cadences modulating from the common chord of C-major through
every possible key and transpository sequence? Had he not written two
books of canons displaying the most amazing technical ingenuities; found
it simple, as in his "Sinfonietta," to keep five or six strands of
counterpoint going? And so, believing that he was about to do for the
music of the post-Wagnerian period what Brahms had done for that of the
romantic period, the musical conservatives and traditionalists rallied
to him. He was acclaimed by a large public lineal successor of the three
great "B's" of music. Quite in the manner that they had once opposed
Brahms to the composer of "Parsifal," the partisans of musical
absolutism elevated Reger as a sort of anti-pope to Richard Strauss.
Whole numbers of musical reviews were devoted to the study and
discussion of his art in all its ramifications. Reger seemed on the
verge of gaining a place among the immortals. And his publishers placed
on the covers of his compositions the design that symbolized the great
things they thought the man achieving, and the high heavens for which
they believed him bound.
The success was momentary only. Long before he died, the world had found
in Max Reger its musical _bête noire_. Closer acquaintance with his art
had not ingratiated him with his public. Indeed, concert-audiences had
become bored to the point of exasperation with his classicizing
compositions. To most folk, it appeared as though the man saw no other
end in composition than the attainment of the opus-number One Thousand.
And although his works are rife with the sort of technical problems and
solutions which those initiated into musical science are supposed to
relish, few musicians found them really attractive. Reger made various
attempts to regain the favor he had lost. They were unavailing. Even
when he turned his back on the absolutists and wrote programmatic music,
romantic suites that begin with Debussy-like low flutes and end with
trumpet blasts that recall the sunrise music of "Also Sprach
Zarathustra," ballet suites that seek to rival the "Carnaval" of
Schumann and the waltzes in "Der Rosenkavalier," "Böcklin" suites that
pretend to translate into tone some of the Swiss painter's canvases, he
only intensified the general ill-will. People who knew him whisper that
he realized his failure, and in consequence took to emptying the vats of
beer that finally drowned him. And on the occasion of his death,
valediction went no further than frigidly applauding his creditable work
for the organ, his erudition and productivity that almost rival those of
the eighteenth-century composers. The final attempt to interest the
public in his work, made during the succeeding season, brought but few
people to repent of their former indifference. A revival of interest is
scarcely to be expected.
For it was not a Brahms the world had gotten again. Indeed, it was a
personality of just the sort that Brahms was not. The resemblance was of
the most superficial. Both men went to school to Bach and the polyphonic
masters. Both were traditionalists. There the kinship ends. For the one
was a poet, a sturdily living, rich and powerful person. The other was
essentially a harsh and ugly being, eminently wanting the divine flame.
For Brahms, erudition was only a means to his end, a fortification of
his personal mode of expression. He saw that the weaknesses of many of
the romantic composers, his kin, of Schumann his spiritual father in
particular, were due their want of organizing power, their helplessness
in the larger forms. And eager to achieve large, solid, resisting form
in his own work, he went to the great masters of musical science, to
Beethoven and Haydn and in particular to Bach, to learn of them, that he
might do for his day something of what they had done for theirs. And he
was able to assimilate vast quantities of his learning, and make it part
of his flesh and bone. At times, no doubt, one is painfully aware of his
erudition, painfully aware that he is applying principles learned from
Beethoven and Bach, manipulating his music out of no inner necessity. At
times, his music does smell of the lamp. And yet, how completely those
juiceless moments are outbalanced by the mass of his living, fragrant,
robust song! With what rareness the pedant in Brahms emerges! Behind
this music there is almost always visible the great, grave, passionate,
resigned creature that was Brahms, the man who sought with all his might
to hold himself firm and erect and unyielding before the hideous
onslaughts of life, the man who lived without hope of fulfilment, loved
without hope of consummation, and yet knew that it was enough
fulfilment, enough consummation to have loved, to have been touched with
a radiant dream; the man who prayed only that his heart might not
wither, and that he might never cease to long and dream and feel the
hurt and solace of beauty and have the power to sing. And in his music
there is almost always the consolation of the great forests, the healing
of the trees and silences, the cooling hands of the earth, the
everlasting yea-saying to love and beauty, the manly resignation, the
leave-taking from dreams and life. All this music says, "Song is
enough."
But no such goodly presence glimmers through the music of Max Reger. No
sturdy bardic spirit vibrates in it. This Reger is a sarcastic, churlish
fellow, bitter and pedantic and rude. He is a sort of musical Cyclops, a
strong, ugly creature bulging with knotty and unshapely muscles, an ogre
of composition. He has little delicacy, little finesse of spirit. In
listening to these works with their clumsy blocks of tone, their eternal
sunless complaining, their lack of humor where they would be humorous,
their lack of passion where they would be profound, their sardonic and
monotonous bourdon, one is perforce reminded of the photograph of Reger
which his publishers place on the cover of their catalogue of his works,
the photograph that shows something that is like a swollen, myopic
beetle with thick lips and sullen expression crouching on an
organ-bench. There is something repulsive as well as pedantic in this
art. The poetry, the nobility, the moderation and cleanness of line of
Brahms is absent. Instead, there is a sort of brutal coldness, the
coldness of the born pedant, a prevalence of bad humor, a poverty of
invention and organizing power that conceals itself under an elaborate
and complex and erudite surface. The strong, calm, classic beauty of
Brahms is wanting. For all its air of subtlety and severity and
profundity, its learned and classicizing manner, the music of Reger is
really superficial. The man only seldom achieves form. Generally, for
all the complex and convulsive activity of his music, nothing really
progresses, develops, happens in it. Above all, the stylistic severity
of Brahms in Reger has become a confusion of styles; an absence of
style. The classic has become the baroque.
Reger is one of the men who develop muscles that hamper all grace and
freedom of activity. One cannot help feeling that he went to the classic
masters for their formulas in order to make of composition chiefly a
mental exercise, that he accepted so many rules and manners and turns in
order to free himself of the necessity of making free and full and
spontaneous movements. With Reger, creation becomes routine. His works
are stereotyped; stale terribly quickly. There are moments when one
wonders whether he understood at all what creation is. For certainly,
three-quarters of his compositions seem written out of no inner
necessity, bring no liberation in their train. They are like
mathematical problems and solutions, sheer brain-spun and unlyrical
works. One is ever conscious in Reger that he is solving contrapuntal
problems in order to astonish the vulgar herd of the professors. Reger
certainly knew the art of talking with an astonishing show of logic, and
yet saying nothing. Perhaps he talked continuously in order not to have
to reflect. And for all his erudition, he understood his masters
intellectually only. He felt himself called upon to continue the work of
the three great "B's," and yet never understood the grand spirit that
animated their art. Strauss, with his fine conduct of instruments
through the score of "Salome," is nearer the spirit of Bach than Reger
with all his fugues and double fugues ever got.
No doubt, Reger loved the mathematical solidity and balance of the older
music, and therefore sought to assimilate it. But he did more than just
learn of it, as Brahms had done. He sought to rival the great men of
the past on their own ground, to do what they did better than they had
done it, to be able to say, "See, I can do the trick, too!" So we find
him writing counterpoint for the sake of the learnedness and presumable
respectability, rather than as a piece of expression. His compositions
are overburdened and cluttered and marred by all sorts of erudite turns
and twists and manoeuvers. The man's entire attention seems to have
been set on making his works astonish the learned and make mad the
simple. Even a slight song like "Wenn die Linde blüht" is decked with
contrapuntal felicities. He copies the mannerisms of the composers of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, contorts his compositions with
all manner of outmoded turns. He appears to have come to his worktable
inevitably with his mind full of the compositions he had been studying.
His impulse seems always a reflected thing, a desire to compete with
some one on that person's terms. He writes fugues for organs and sonatas
for violin solo under the influence of Bach, concerti grossi under the
influence of Haendel, variations under that of Mozart, sonatas under
that of Brahms. In vain one searches for a perfectly individual style
throughout his works. The living man is buried under the mass of badly
assimilated learning. Even at best, in the Hiller variations, in some of
the string trios and organ fugues, some of his grave adagios, even in
some of his sardonic and turbulent scherzi (perhaps his most original
contributions), his art is rather more a refinement on another art than
a fresh and vital expression. In him, education had produced the typical
pedant, a pedant of Cyclopean muscularity, perhaps, but nevertheless a
pedant.
And so, instead of being Brahms's successor, Reger is to-day seen as the
very contrary of Brahms. It is not that fugues and concerti in the olden
style cannot be written to-day, that modern music and the antique forms
are incompatible. It is that Reger was very little the artist. He
mistook the material vesture for the spirit, thought that there were
formulas for composition, royal roads to the heaven of Bach and Mozart.
Something more of humanity, sympathy for man and his experiences, inner
freedom, might have saved him. But it was just the poetic gift that the
man was lamentably without. And so, freighted with too much erudition
and too little wisdom, Reger went aground.