Download History and Max Reger Leon Botstein

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
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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.