1873–1916 · Romantic
Max Reger (1873–1916) was a German composer, organist, pianist, conductor and teacher. He wrote for organ, piano, chamber groups, choir and orchestra, and many of his works are fugues and variations. For a player he is an author of polyphonic music, and the site has one of his organ pieces.
Reger was born on 19 March 1873 in Brand, Bavaria, the first child of the village schoolteacher Josef Reger, who was also an amateur musician. His mother was called Katharina Philomena. The family was devoutly Catholic, and in 1874 it moved to Weiden, where the boy grew up. Only one sister, Emma, survived with him, since three other children had died young.
When he turned five, his father began teaching him the organ, violin and cello, and his mother taught him the piano. Between 1884 and 1889 his teacher at the piano and the organ was Adalbert Lindner, a pupil of his father. He often stood in for Lindner at the organ of the town's parish church. In 1886, following his parents' wishes, he entered the royal preparatory school to train as a teacher.
In 1888 his uncle, Johann Baptist Ulrich, invited Reger to the Bayreuth Festival. There he saw two operas by Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Parsifal. The impression was deep, and at fifteen he decided to give his life to music.
In the late summer of that year he wrote his first large work, an Overture in B minor for orchestra, 120 pages long and never published. Lindner sent the score to Hugo Riemann. Riemann replied kindly, but warned the young author against Wagner's influence and advised him to write melodies rather than motifs. In June 1889 Reger finished the preparatory school.
The works of that year included a scherzo for string quartet and flute, a three-movement string quartet and a Largo for violin and piano. His father asked him to send the last two pieces to Josef Rheinberger, a professor in Munich, who recognised the young man's talent. His father worried about his future, but Reger still chose the life of a musician.
In 1890 Reger began to study music theory with Hugo Riemann in Sondershausen; as a pianist he also worked with Adolf Schulze. He then followed his teacher to Wiesbaden and studied composition as well, with Albert Fuchs. At the evenings of early music that Fuchs held at home, Reger played the harpsichord.
The first works to which Reger gave opus numbers were chamber music and songs. Being a pianist himself, he wrote for the piano and for the organ alike. The Three Choruses of 1892 were the earliest piece for choir with piano that he gave an opus number. He taught music theory, piano and organ at the Wiesbaden conservatory until 1896.
After a nervous breakdown Reger resigned and spent several years in his parents' house, working only at composition. In September 1901 he moved to Munich. He was offered concerts there, and his rapid rise to fame began. In his first Munich season he appeared in ten concerts as an organist, a pianist and a chamber accompanist.
He then wrote a very large number of works for organ and voice, and the three Munich masterpieces: the quintet for piano and strings, Op. 64, and two sonatas for piano and violin, Op. 72 and Op. 84. Income from publishers, concerts and private teaching let him marry in 1902. His wife Elsa was a divorced Protestant, so Reger was excommunicated from the Catholic Church. He kept on composing without a break.
Reger performed widely as a conductor and pianist, including outside Germany: in 1906 he toured in St Petersburg. From 1907 he worked in Leipzig: he was music director of the University Church (until 1908) and professor of composition at the Royal Conservatory, where he taught until his death. Among his students were Sigurd Islandsmoen, Cristòfor Taltabull, Alfred von Beckerath, Joseph Haas, Sándor Jemnitz, Aarre Merikanto and George Szell.
In 1908 he began to write the 100th Psalm, Op. 106, for mixed choir and orchestra, a piece for the 350th birthday of the university in Jena. Its first part had its premiere on 31 July of that year, and the composer finished the score in 1909, and in 1910 it was performed simultaneously in Chemnitz and Breslau. In May 1910 a three-day festival devoted to his music took place in Dortmund. It was organised by the local musicians Georg Hüttner and Karl Holtschneider, with the support of the violinist Henri Marteau.
In 1911 Reger became court music director to Duke Georg II of Saxe-Meiningen and became responsible for the music of the Meiningen Court Theatre. At the same time he went on giving his master class at the Leipzig conservatory. Op. 128, written in 1913, is a set of four tone poems after paintings by Arnold Böcklin, one of which is Die Toteninsel (Isle of the Dead).
In 1914 Reger gave up the court post for health reasons. The First World War led him to plan a choral work in memory of those lost, and he started on a setting of the Latin Requiem, which stayed unfinished. He also composed eight motets, the Eight Sacred Songs for mixed choir, Op. 138. In 1915 the composer moved to Jena and went to Leipzig each week for his teaching. While living in Jena he wrote the Requiem on a poem by Hebbel for soloist, choir and orchestra.
Reger died of a heart attack in Leipzig on 11 May 1916, during one of his weekly trips to teach at the conservatory. Beside his bed lay the printer's proofs of the Eight Sacred Songs. Six years after his death the urn with his ashes was moved from Jena to a cemetery in Weimar, and in 1930, at his widow's wish, his remains were taken to Munich and buried in the Waldfriedhof.
After his death, Reger's wife Elsa worked a great deal on organising and promoting his legacy, and in 1930 she published an autobiography, Mein Leben mit und für Max Reger (My Life with and for Max Reger). The couple adopted two girls. For the composer's 150th anniversary, in 2023, a translation of the book Max Reger. Work Instead of Life by the German musicologist Susanne Popp appeared in Moscow.
The early Reger wrote above all songs, chamber and choral music, as well as pieces for the piano and the organ. Later he turned to the orchestra. Among the orchestral works Mozart-themed Variations and Fugue (1914) is well known, and among the pieces for choir and orchestra are Gesang der Verklärten (1903), the 100th Psalm (1909), Der Einsiedler and the Requiem on a poem by Hebbel (both 1915). In a little over twenty-five years he produced an enormous amount of music, almost always in abstract forms. A good share of his works are fugues or sets of variations. The Mozart set follows this plan and takes its theme from the start of Mozart's sonata in A major, K. 331.
Reger was drawn to fugue and wrote in almost every genre except opera and the symphony, although he did write a Sinfonietta, Op. 90. He backed absolute music and saw himself in the tradition of Beethoven and Brahms. Their classical forms went together in his music with the broadened harmony of Liszt and Wagner, and to this he added Bach's intricate counterpoint. His music for solo piano and for two pianos makes him Brahms's heir in the central German line: Reger took up Brahms's idea of unbroken development and free modulation with great energy, yet stayed grounded in polyphony of the Bach kind.
Reger wrote a great deal of music for the organ. Of his organ music, the most popular pieces are said to be the Benedictus, taken from the set Op. 59, and the Fantasy and Fugue on BACH, Op. 46. From 1898 he was linked with the organist Karl Straube by friendship and joint work: Straube gave the first performances of many of Reger's organ works, for example the three chorale fantasias, Op. 52. The Introduction, Passacaglia and Fugue, Op. 127, is dedicated to him, and Straube gave its first performance in 1913, at the opening of the Wilhelm Sauer organ in the Centennial Hall in Breslau. Reger himself made recordings of several of his pieces on a Welte Philharmonic organ, among them extracts from the 52 Chorale Preludes, Op. 67.
He also wrote a great deal for voice: songs, works for mixed, men's and women's choir, and large choral pieces with orchestra. He set poems by Eichendorff, Hebbel, Lenau, Rückert, Uhland, Bierbaum, Chamisso, Geibel, Liliencron and Gabriele D'Annunzio. He assigned opus numbers to his major works himself. Reger's chamber works are reflective and unconventional, and the influence of Baroque methods such as the continuo can be heard in them.
The site currently has one work by Reger: Großer Gott, wir loben dich, Op. 135a, No. 10, for organ, at intermediate level. If you play the organ, you can begin getting to know this composer with it.