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Notes from the Editor History and Max Reger Leon Botstein This 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 doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdh029 87:617–627 © The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. 618 The Musical Quarterly lineage and heritage in music was at best ambivalent. The reasons were Mahler’s status as a Jew and exotic (and linked to the non-German parts of the Habsburg Empire), as well as the aspects of his music that startled: the fragmentation, quotations, discontinuities, and extremes in instrumentation. Reger definitely courted a somewhat more conservative and conciliatory public status as a composer. As Elsa Reger recounted, Strauss complimented Reger after hearing the Four Tone Poems after A. Böcklin, op. 128, by suggesting that with “one step closer,” he, Reger, would “be one of us,” to which Reger replied that this was a step he would never take.1 When Reger began to write his op. 112, Die Nonnen, he was determined to use an antique, historically inspired style to avoid what he regarded as the manipulation of the clichés of a “Liedertafel” style, which he believed that Strauss had too ironically used in the music for Jochanaan in Salome. Reger maintained an allegiance to a normative and overtly conservative ideal of musical logic and form, one identifiable by the educated public. Reger’s view of his vocation can properly be compared with Mendelssohn’s. Despite its overtly conservative form, Reger’s music, like Mendelssohn’s, contained elements of contradiction and novelty, creating a tension between neoclassical formalism and romantic expressiveness. Reger’s legendary contempt for journalistic criticism notwithstanding, he did not take refuge in the pseudo-Wagnerian defense of being misunderstood by philistines and ahead of his time, as Mahler had done. He did not assume the mantle of radical innovation per se. Yet, particularly between 1903 and 1906, notably in Munich, he was branded as a progressive radical, his distaste for his more flamboyant contemporaries notwithstanding. Reger’s death was taken as a setback to an affirmative national cultural agenda of maintaining German superiority in the arts, particularly in music. Reger’s well-documented criticism of slavish adherents to a neoWagnerian aesthetic reminds one that Wagner and his followers did not possess a monopoly on cultural nationalism. Rather, his skepticism regarding the utility of Wagner as a model, and his nationalism, remind one of that other conservative, rabid German cultural nationalist, Heinrich Schenker. It is ironic that Schenker had little use for Reger, who, after all, was widely revered posthumously as a beacon of “healthy” and rigorous cultural values in music. Schenker argued for the integration of inspiration with consummate craftsmanship, framed by deference to tradition. But for Schenker, Reger simply was not good enough to be called the heir to Brahms or Bach, and his overt debts to traditions in form and polyphonic writing were masks that sought to cover a failure to understand the essence of phrase structure in tonality, mediocrity if not arrogance.2 As recent scholars have noted, even the anti-Wagnerian Brahms was part of the German ideal of new music as a force for nationalist assertion. Notes from the Editor 619 Reger pursued a more eclectic path that embraced the so-called reactionary with the neo-Wagnerian in the task of defining and framing the fin-de-siècle conceit of German cultural superiority in music.3 Reger’s prominence at the time, like that of Hans Pfitzner’s, can be understood in the light of the dynamics of the interaction between twentiethcentury aesthetic modernism and politics. Mahler’s prominence and Schoenberg’s ultimate notoriety were not only not useful to nationalism, but also subversive. As has been noted, Mahler and his music, for evident biographical reasons, the confrontational aesthetic, and the implicit narrative of the music most aptly characterized by Adorno, did not fit a German nationalist agenda, despite a major following among critics and audiences. Schoenberg’s cultural chauvinism regarding the superiority of the German tradition of music (and his faith in his own place in it) and his radical construct of an avant-garde classicism did not offset the reality that the music, even before the 1920s, made any nationalist political use implausible. For all of Strauss’s unattractive habits of coming to terms with political regimes, from Wilhelm II to Hitler, his capacity for turning irony and humor on himself as well as others reflected his thoroughgoing skepticism of religion and modern politics, fueled by a close reading not only of Nietzsche, but of Goethe and Cervantes. Taillefer, op. 52 (1903), Bardengesang, op. 55 (1905), Austria, op. 78 (1929), and the Olympic Hymn, op. 119 (1934), are each effective and finely crafted works for chorus and orchestra written to curry favor in explicit cultural political terms. The first two actually possess moments of magic in terms of the material, the orchestration, and the operatic drama Strauss generates. The last two sport a brazenly plain surface, but underneath, a sarcastic detachment, even bittersweet parody, are audible. The music contains subtle and not-so-subtle moments that undermine the banalities and pieties of the texts. This all left Reger with one near competitor, one with less talent and certainly a less attractive personality—Pfitzner, whose public importance benefited from Reger’s premature death. But Pfitzner did not pursue the studied historicist strategy Reger created for new music. A provocative and useful guide to the spirit of the era in which Reger came of age and made his career is the unfairly neglected novel published in 1919 by Heinrich Mann, Der Untertan. The novel centers around Diederich Hessling, who, as his name might suggest, is a complex but repulsive middle-class child of his age. Lacking in principle, discipline, probity, or any other virtue, he achieves a position of power in his community through the ruthless but hypocritical assertion of those virtues. He becomes the advocate of reactionary political values particularly deferential to the Wilhelmine monarchy and cast in a rhetoric based in a xenophobic fear of cultural and moral degeneration. Hessling is a disturbing 620 The Musical Quarterly figure—at least for contemporary American readers. He sounds all too much like today’s conservative Republican ideologues. Hessling reads like a provincial Tom DeLay or Karl Rove, politically ambitious and equally dangerous but not nearly as clever. He is nonetheless entirely plausible and no caricature, which is what makes him so frightening. Hessling is slavishly deferential to the emperor, Wilhelm II, and to the idea of military power, order, authority, aristocracy, and national superiority. Yet he is also a coward. His nationalism takes its form not through mere anti-liberal reaction, but through the embrace of a modernity that celebrates struggle, sacrifice, and international commercial and military competition. Hessling is aroused by patriotism, industrial progress, and the creation of a German naval presence, in the spirit of Admiral Tirpitz, designed to challenge England. The villains in Hessling’s world are the older washed-out national liberals of the 1848 generation, aesthetes (with their weakness for cosmopolitan culture), Jews, and socialists. The art that such enthusiastic subjects of Wilhelmine Germany delight in is, in Mann’s account, grandiose, affirmative, and kitsch, unmarked by grace, craft, or a notion of the avant-garde; the pervasive fear is that German sensibilities might be corrupted by French, English, Slavic, or American trends. The monuments and architecture of the era are historicist, but on an industrial and aggressive scale. Tradition is explicitly celebrated, but transfigured by the demands of modernity and the call to national greatness. Fiction aside, an essentially philistine official culture emanating from the imperial court and clique in Berlin did make itself felt, particularly in literature and the visual arts, around 1900. It was sufficient to drive the young Oscar Bluemner, who later became an important modernist American architect and artist (and who was briefly part of Alfred Stieglitz’s circle), to emigrate from Germany.4 Bluemner, no doubt touched by some degree of delusion, nonetheless explained his departure from Germany in terms of a direct dispute with the emperor about art. Even though music more than architecture or painting was contingent, in the years Reger made his career, not on patronage, but on the tastes of a wide middle-class public, through performance, music education, amateurism, and journalism, it is important to understand Reger’s idiosyncratic synthesis and extension of tradition, his compositional ambitions and choices, in the context of the tastes and tensions of post-Bismarck and pre1914 Germany. Reger’s resolution of the competing claims of the legacies of Bach, Brahms, and Wagner on the one hand, and the allure of a more startling break with the past in response to the contemporary world—comparable to Debussy in France, Scriabin and Stravinsky in Russia, and Mahler and Schoenberg in the Habsburg Empire—on the other, can be located narrowly within the confines of the politics of German imperial and national Notes from the Editor 621 cultural self-definition during the 1890s. Reger can be understood as a phenomenon in terms of the need to display virtuosity in craft within a polemical stylized historicism. His aesthetic can be placed alongside the Thomas Mann of Buddenbrooks, just as the Debussy of Pelleas and the Dukas of Ariane et Barbe-Bleu (1907) might be linked with Proust, or the late Mahler with Robert Musil, and in stylistic ideology, Schoenberg with Karl Kraus. Richard Strauss, in contrast to Reger, maintained a brand of cultural allegiance to the notion of German cultural superiority of the kind located by Henrich Mann in Der Untertan in the characters of the national liberal Buck family, Hessling’s opposite numbers. Strauss was just enough older than Reger to have absorbed values of the 1848 generation. His nostalgia for the eighteenth century was more than a pose. It runs through his entire career, from his taste in painting, to the libretto of the 1941 Capriccio, and to his deep attachment to the late Goethe. Mozart stands at the center of his musical ideal. Reger shared a similar late-nineteenth-century romantic embrace of eighteenth-century classicism but, in part owing to his absence of irony and his more Wilhelmine moralistic patriotism, Reger was drawn further back to Bach, much as Pfitzner would turn to an even more distant historical model in Palestrina. The gravity, density, and religiosity of Bach appealed to Reger. Strauss, in contrast to Pfitzner and certainly to Reger, was tone-deaf to Christianity. In the end, what makes Reger far more interesting and fascinating than Pfitzner is the indispensable quality Pfitzner celebrated in print but lacked as a composer: musical inspiration. Reger’s music has remained more consistently appealing and convincing. It holds a greater promise of maintaining an ongoing place in the active repertory. Fritz Reiner, for example, never entirely embraced Mahler’s music or that of the Second Viennese School. He was a staunch champion of Strauss and his teacher Bartók. But he admired the music of Reger.5 The collection of essays in this issue derives for the most part from a session at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society organized by Walter Frisch. Since the 2004 AMS session, Frisch has published a fine volume entitled German Modernism: Music and the Arts (University of California Press, 2005), the first and most important English-language account of music and its place in the cultural politics between the 1870s and the beginning of the twentieth century. Understandably, Frisch’s book begins with Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche and closes with Richard Strauss, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and the characterization of Hans Pfitzner as a regressive modernist. Much of Frisch’s argument turns on how we understand modernism. Frisch offers a taxonomy of descriptive categories such as historicism. As his contribution to this volume makes clear, there is a need to differentiate between various kinds of modernisms and historicisms in order to understand the cross-currents and complexities in the 622 The Musical Quarterly musical output of the era. In Frisch’s book, Reger is extensively discussed in connection with the revival of Bach and the role that Bach played in the aesthetic transformation of compositional strategies among composers in the decades before World War I. Reger’s particular engagement with Bach as both organist and composer is a theme that is revisited in this issue of MQ. That the music and career of Max Reger are once again attracting interest among scholars outside Germany is welcome. As Reinhold Brinkmann points out, Reger’s music has hovered on the periphery of the standard repertory, in part owing to the persistent advocacy of key performers, most notably two generations of Serkins. Nonetheless, despite a substantial lack of active familiarity with the music itself, Reger is one of those composers to whom certain clichés stick whether or not they fit. His music is considered academic, knotty, dense, and thick. Reger remains most closely associated with what is regarded to have been a conservative historicism or neoclassicism in the trajectory of a neo-Brahmsian notion of “absolute” music. In the essays in this volume, Reger’s connection to Brahms, and by implication, Schoenberg, given Schoenberg’s celebrated revisionist view of Brahms, is touched upon more than once. Although the contributors to this volume, and Frisch himself in his new book, provide important close readings of many of Reger’s works, including the Concerto for Piano, op. 114, there is very little discussion of his music for orchestra. Whatever one may think of the hierarchies of musical genres, particularly the prestige of chamber music, a composer’s career and reputation in the later nineteenth century depended greatly on the fate of music written for large forces for a wide public. These genres include opera, ballet, and choral and orchestral music. It has been argued that Brahms’s relatively late emergence as a composer of music for orchestra in the 1870s was prompted not only by psychological factors and anxieties, but by the need to counter the phenomenal public success of Wagner.6 Those skeptical of Wagner’s ambitions and aesthetic prejudices sought to compete with him, albeit indirectly, after 1870 by reaching the public with large-scale works with an inherent dramatic power. Max Bruch turned to the secular oratorio. Brahms chose the symphony and concerto. Max Reger was the author of an important body of orchestral music beyond the concerti for violin and piano. Indeed, it was through this orchestral music, including the massive and brilliant Psalm 100 for chorus and orchestra, that Reger’s reputation as a major figure of German music came to be widely known. It was the orchestral music that during the 1920s sustained the argument about what might have been had Reger lived. And Reger, like Mendelssohn before him, wrote both “absolute” music for orchestra (the three sets of variations on themes by Hiller, Mozart, and Beethoven) and so-called “program” music (e.g., the Romantic Suite). Notes from the Editor 623 One of the most popular series of guidebooks for music lovers in the early twentieth century was Schlesinger’s Musikbibliothek, published in Berlin. The first volume of sixteen to appear was a remarkable publication on the Beethoven symphonies, edited by A. Pochhammer and with contributions by, among others, the Viennese critic and Brucknerian Theodor Helm.7 Apart from one guide to the operas of Strauss, two on Wagner, one on Mozart operas, and one on the Beethoven string quartets, the remaining Schlesinger volumes all deal exclusively with orchestral music. The sixteenth volume, edited by Georg Gräner, is devoted to the orchestral music of Max Reger. This posthumous publication placed Reger in an honored position alongside volumes on the orchestral music of Brahms, Liszt, Mahler, and Strauss.8 Gräner was not the first commentator to suggest that when one considers the orchestral music of Reger, the place of Brahms in the evolution of Reger’s aesthetic appears less dominant. Rather, the importance of Wagner and Franz Liszt comes to the fore, further complicating the question of how Reger’s ambitions might be characterized. One forgets the remarkable quote attributed to Reger (in contrast to a more famous comparable assertion associated with Hans von Bülow), that the “tenth symphony of Beethoven” was Franz Liszt’s Faust Symphony.9 For a neo-Brahmsian, to circumvent the four Brahms symphonies as the legitimate heirs to Beethoven, to pass over the symphonic contributions of the early romantic era (e.g., Mendelssohn and Schumann), and to highlight the Faust Symphony offers us more than a clue. Gräner, in his brief biographical introduction, credits Reger’s ambition to become a composer to his encounter with Wagner. Guido Bagier, one of Reger’s early biographers (apart from the 1922 memoir-biography by Adalbert Lindner, Reger’s teacher), was among the first to confront directly the contradictions and ambiguities the Reger case presents for the historian and critic. Bagier believed the Lisztian and Wagnerian influence in the music to be profound, in terms of both Reger’s biography and his conception of the function and sound of large-scale instrumental music.10 There are certainly works for orchestra that support the image of Reger as a conservative historicist and yet justify the claim, which Frisch so effectively articulates, that historicist modernism was, at the fin-de-siècle, no dry academic exercise but a vitally expressive strategy for composers in search of a distinctive voice. In the orchestral corpus there are the two outstanding conservative ventures, the Variations, op. 100, on a theme by Hiller, and op. 132 on a theme by Mozart. From a compositional point of view, the Hiller Variations are perhaps the most virtuosic, but it is the Mozart Variations that have stayed in the repertory the longest, in part because the theme that Reger chose was (and remains) one of Mozart’s best-known tunes, particularly among musical amateurs. The theme is the A-major opening of the first 624 The Musical Quarterly movement of K. 331. That sonata has been played by every piano student in modern history. The ubiquity of this movement in the piano teaching repertory for amateurs motivated Schenker to subject modern printed editions to his withering critique of editorial practices.11 Among the victims of Schenker’s critical ire was none other than Reger’s primary teacher, Hugo Riemann. Schenker’s obsessive critique of Riemann in part accounts for why his opinion of Reger was never particularly flattering.12 The Mozart Variations are remarkable for their clarity and comprehensibility. The brilliance and harmonic ingenuity with which Reger transformed the thematic material in the cases of Hiller and Beethoven are replaced by techniques of playfulness and decoration. Emphasis was put on the exquisite and fragmented character of the orchestration. But, just as in the other two variation opuses, as Helmut Wirth observed, Reger’s ambition was to generate originality in the sound of his music by exhausting harmonic possibilities even when faced with seemingly straightforward thematic material.13 That led to the much-talked-about harmonic originality and the elements of surprise in Reger’s music. Reger’s own little pedagogical volume, Modulationslehre, first published in 1903, went into at least fifteen printings. The particular copy of the fifteenth edition I consulted was the copy the young Claudio Arrau bought in 1925.14 This remarkable little book gives a dense snapshot of the conception of harmony that Reger employs. It underscores the virtuosic and concise connections Reger is able to make between tonalities. He even posits keys that do not exist, such as B-double-flat. The chromaticism is extreme, particularly in examples that begin in C-sharp major. Reger does not use enharmonic change in diminished seventh or augmented sixth chords, but stays with common chords, with special emphasis on the Neapolitan, as if to stress the potential of common chords.15 Reger, like Strauss, delighted in the cleverness and ingenuity of his harmonic tricks and surprises. But the radical and strange progressions and shifts within the framework of tonality that Reger employs distinguish him from Strauss, whose harmonic virtuosity and fluidity are governed largely by a surface of apparent simplicity or invention in melodic lines and voice leading.16 Strauss, chromatic as he may be, sounds less abrupt and more consistently lyrical even in his very late work, from Capriccio on. The most Reger-like of Strauss’s works might be, in the end, the Duet-Concertino and the Oboe Concerto, despite their austere and lean character. Beyond the Hiller and Mozart Variations, there are the muchneglected Beethoven Variations, op. 86, which were actually written earlier in Reger’s career, for piano. But their occurrence in the repertory, however occasional, is exclusively in their later orchestral version. All the fingerprints of Reger’s harmonic style and compositional virtuosity in Notes from the Editor 625 the variation form are audible, including the massive fugue at the end. To the neoclassic grouping one can add Konzert im alten Stil, op. 123. However, when one considers Reger’s earlier Symphonietta, op. 90, and the Serenade, op. 95, one senses a different source of inspiration. Here the presence of Liszt and Wagner is marked. But it is ultimately in the two later works, the Romantic Suite, op. 125, and the Vier Tondichtungen nach A. Böcklin that Reger reaches the apogee of his creativity and originality as a composer. These works are distinct in terms of orchestral color. Their form is narrative and illustrative in a manner close to both Liszt and Strauss. The lyricism of the opening movement of the Böcklin and the evocation of the “Island of the Dead” are neo-Wagnerian narratives, inspired, as was Liszt’s Hunnenschlacht, by paintings. They are in the tradition of the romantic tone poem replete with Mahlerian effects, defined by Reger’s particular affinity for vast sonorities and multiple contrapuntal layers. Op. 125 is the most like Liszt in the sense that it is quasi-motto-like and monothematic, closing with the material with which it opens. Reger in this regard can be understood as working along lines similar to Dvorak at the end of his career, finding his own synthesis of the Wagnerian and the Brahmsian. The Romantic Suite, like the late tone poems of Dvorak based on Erben, is tied closely to a poetic text. Reger, much like Dvorak, and for that matter Strauss in some of his tone poems (particularly Don Juan and Also sprach Zarathustra), pays close attention to the formal implications of the poetic verse. The text behind the Romantic Suite is by Eichendorff. The orchestral works, from the point of view of near-contemporaries as well as later commentators, remind us that the Reger problem is not easily understood. Bagier, like Brinkmann, understood the Reger problem along the lines of Schiller’s distinction between the naïve and the sentimental. The lineage for Bagier, setting Wagner and Beethoven aside, was in Reger’s case, Schubert and Bruckner—naïve talents caught in a contradiction between their personalities and the historical times in which they lived.17 This is a startling, counterintuitive suggestion that seeks to explode not only the notion of Reger as academic or reactionary. It places some doubt on the utility of the concept of historicism. There were no composers in Reger’s lifetime who were not overwhelmed by history. The notion of a historicist composer consumed by the example of Bach blinds us from hearing in Reger the coloristic use of the orchestra that sounds more like Debussy and Dukas than Strauss or Mahler. Reger was not a reactionary. And as all commentators have noted, there is an expressive power and search for monumentality that, despite skeptics such as Carl Dahlhaus, Reger successfully realizes, particularly in what may be his greatest work for the public, the Psalm 100, completed in 1906. Brinkmann 626 The Musical Quarterly explores compositional fragments to find similar qualities in Reger, but there is ample evidence in Psalm 100. There have always been Reger admirers, including Schoenberg and Hindemith (who tried, unsuccessfully, to “improve” Psalm 100). There may, in the end, be no need to probe further into the ambiguities and contradictions that surround Reger’s music. He was no more historicist than Strauss; he may simply have been less ironic in his use of history. And as is pointed out in this volume, in the discussion of Reger’s vengeful and witty use of Bach materials, their transformation is but a beginning element in the formation of a new compositional fabric. Listening to Reger’s use of Bach, one is reminded of the Violin Concerto by Alban Berg. If one takes that work as a starting point for thinking about Reger, one can hear in Reger an expressive novelty as compelling as Berg’s, and one might be inclined to forget the historical models, the compositional virtuosity, the density, and the startling habit of harmonic ingenuity. Reger might, oddly enough, have been a naïve composer, despite his technical skills—a Schubert of modernism. For those who might find that notion bizarre, one might recommend listening to a work in a form that both Reger and Mahler excelled in, the orchestral song: Reger’s haunting setting of Hölderlin’s An die Hoffnung, op. 124, written in 1912. The hope is that the renewed scholarly interest in Reger will help restore his music, particularly that for orchestra, to the concert stage. Notes The editors would like to thank Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden, for their support of this project. All excerpts from Max Reger’s works included in this volume are reproduced by permission of Breitkopf & Härtel, publisher of Reger’s Complete Works. 1. Helmuth Wirth, Max Reger, mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Frankfurt am Main: Rowohlt, 1973), 10. 2. See Schenker’s essays on Reger’s op. 81, Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Bach, in Das Meisterwerk in der Musik II (Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1926), esp. 192. 3. See Daniel Beller-McKenna, Brahms and the German Spirit (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). 4. See Barbara Haskell, Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2005). 5. See Kenneth Morgan, Fritz Reiner: Maestro and Martinet (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005). 6. See Leon Botstein, “Brahms and His Audience: The Late Viennese Years, 1875–1897,” in The Cambridge Companion to Brahms, ed. Michael Musgrave (Oxford and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 51–78. 7. A. Pochhammer, ed., Meisterführer No. 1: Beethoven’s Symphonien (Berlin: Schlesinger’s Buch- und Musikhandlung, n.d.). Notes from the Editor 627 8. Georg Gräner, Meisterführer No. 16: Max Reger: Sämtliche Orchesterwerke (Berlin: Schlesinger’s Buch- und Musikhandlung, n.d.). 9. Reger to Karl Straube, 22 Oct. 1909, quoted in Guido Bagier, Max Reger (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1923), 186. 10. See Bagier, Reger, esp. the chapter on orchestral music, 186–216. 11. See the various discussions collected in Der Tonwille: Pamphlets in Witness of the Immutable Laws of Music, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004–05). 12. See Schenker, Der Tonwille, 2: 27–28 and 33–34. 13. See Wirth, Max Reger, 123f. 14. Max Reger, Modulationslehre, 15th ed. (Leipzig: Kahnt, 1921). 15. I want to thank my colleague, the composer Richard Wilson, a master teacher of harmony, for his comments on Reger’s pamphlet. 16. Consider the final bars of the last movement of Strauss’s Tageszeiten. 17. See Bagier, Reger, 299.