Max Reger and Karl Straube

Perspectives on an Organ Performing Tradition

Christopher Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351558754
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Max Reger (1873-1916) is perhaps best-known for his organ music. This quickly assumed a prominent place in the repertory of German organists due in large measure to the efforts of Reger's contemporary Karl Straube (1873-1950). The personal and collegial relationship between the composer and performer began in 1898 and developed until Reger's death. By that time, Straube had established himself as an important artist and teacher in Leipzig and the central authority for the interpretation of Reger's organ music. The Reger-Straube relationship functioned on a number of levels with decisive consequences both for the composition of the music and its interpretation over a period fraught with upheaval on sociopolitical, religious and aesthetic fronts. This book evaluates the significance of the relationship between the composer and organist using primary source materials such as autograph performing manuscripts, reviews, programmes, letters and archival sources from contemporary organ building. The result is a much enhanced understanding of Reger in terms of performance practice and reception history, and a re-examination of Straube and, more broadly, of Leipzig as a musical centre during this period.

Chapter 1

Reger, Straube, and the Organ: Aspects of the Relationship, 1898-1916

Max Reger and Karl Straube first met in the spring of 1898 on the occasion of three organ recitals Straube gave in St. Paul’s Church/Frankfurt a.M., the second of which on 1 April featured portions of Reger’s Suite in E minor op. 16. We do not know how much Reger knew of Straube—his background, his technical talent, his ideas about performance, his sympathies toward old and new music—before he journeyed to Frankfurt from his home in Wiesbaden to hear Straube play. Hence, we cannot know if Reger’s only motivation for attending was the fact that his music was being performed publicly—certainly rare in 1898—or if his curiosity had been fed by the rising reputation of the performer. We can be sure, though, that the Reger-Straube relationship arose from Straube’s initial interest in Reger’s music, an interest almost certainly acquired from the Berlin organist Heinrich Reimann (1850-1906) and stimulated by the young composer’s blend of tradition and innovation in a highly individual approach to counterpoint, harmony, and form. At the time of their meeting, Straube and Reger had learned to value the great musical past (which they both regarded as self-evidently German and primarily Bachian), and they thought about the relationship of past to present in similar ways. Straube allowed the possibilities of Wilhelm Sauer’s instruments to shape an original, orchestrally oriented approach to old organ music (i.e. by J. S. Bach and his predecessors) consciously removed from ‘historical performance’ as we would think of it today. Reger manifested a similar philosophy by composing music that was at once almost pedantically historical in form and brazenly modern in harmony.

Such is the common ground upon which Reger and Straube built their relationship from 1898 onward. By contrast, the two men brought to their lifelong association very different backgrounds with respect to environment, education, and personality. Writers soon recognized this, and they began to describe a relationship built as much on contrast as on similarity. Notions of the Reger-Straube friendship settled into broadly drawn stereotypes on which many received assumptions are based. Aside from isolated efforts to explore the details of the relationship—Susanne Popp’s 1986 edition of the extant correspondence, for example—most writers have contented themselves with the kind of description offered already in 1907 by Gustav Robert-Tornow:

The Bavarian [is] a potent genius, essentially related to his time only through music and the intimate experiences of youthful years filled with disappointment. The north German [is] a scholarly intelligence, capable of every type of objective and logical thought; he is comprehensively educated, primarily as an historian, but not only with respect to art. As well as an amateur could possibly be, he is also at home in the experiences of many peoples and times. Reger, at least in the works of his ‘Sturm und Drang’ period, is the impressionist, perhaps not lacking the tendency to preserve what he improvises and therefore often criticized. Straube, who sees immediately the wealth of possibilities via experiment and reflection, is always struggling with his own self-criticism. Even with regard to accomplishments of great integrity, he is ready at the drop of a hat to reject all his work in favor of a new idea that suddenly suggests itself to his restless mind... Straube is a modern historian in that he lives in the charm of details and shapes each detail with charm.¹

Robert-Tornow’s comments give rise to a portrait of the two men no doubt accurate in many respects. His statements about Reger’s relationship to improvisation and Straube’s penchant for detail are remarkable for 1907. However, general observations like these invite certain inaccurate assumptions. From the contrast between an improvising Kraftgenie and a considered scholar does not necessarily follow, for example, that Reger was unconcerned with detail or self-criticism. That Reger’s early years as a composer were difficult does not mean that Straube’s performance career developed in a smooth and untroubled way. And Straube’s willingness to abandon his interpretive ideas (likewise a remarkable observation for 1907), while more accurate with respect to certain repertories than others, never took the form of categorical and irrevocable self-rejection.²

Max Reger, the ‘potent genius’

Max Reger was the first child of Joseph and Philomena Reger, a devoutly Roman Catholic couple living in the village of Brand (Bavarian Oberpfalz). Reger’s father was a schoolteacher, and at Easter 1874 the family moved to the somewhat larger nearby town of Weiden, where Joseph took up a new position at the local Catholic preparatory school. After receiving rudimentary music lessons from his parents, Max began piano and organ study with Adalbert Lindner (1860-1946) in 1884.³ Lindner, who had received instruction in music theory, geography, and German from Joseph Reger at the Weiden preparatory school,⁴ himself became a schoolteacher at Weiden in 1879. At least partially through a common interest in music and music-making, Lindner became a friend of the Reger family and was entrusted with Max’s fiirther practical training in music through 1889. In 1888, the fifteen-year-old Reger attended performances of Parsifal and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at Bayreuth, and he may have decided to pursue a musical career based at least in part on the strong impressions made by those works.⁵ In 1890, upon the recommendation of Lindner and against the wishes of his parents, Reger took up compositional studies with Hugo Riemann (1849-1919) at the Sondershausen Conservatory, following Riemann shortly thereafter to his new post at the Freudenberg Conservatory in Wiesbaden. Riemann, whose own musical tastes and theoretical presuppositions led to a largely negative view of Liszt and Wagner, directed Reger towards intense study of the Viennese masters (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms), and he encouraged in his pupil a fluid contrapuntal ability based on both tonal and modal models. Aside from what must have been at the time an uncommonly detailed working knowledge of musical style,⁶ Reger gained from Riemann in the early 1890s a veneration of Johannes Brahms as the most significant figure for the future of tonal music and a preoccupation with the contrapuntal techniques of canon, fugue, passacaglia, and variation. The first of these characteristics—an appreciation of Brahms—realized itself through the remarkable imitation of Brahmsian manner in Reger’s first published works. Reger’s unqualified positive stance toward Brahms would diminish over the years, particularly with regard to Brahms’ orchestration techniques. By contrast, Reger’s interest in thoroughgoing counterpoint would never ebb, although he would sacrifice linearity to a remarkably free harmonic language. Riemann accepted a position at the University of Leipzig in 1895, and he was able to secure Reger as his replacement for theory instruction in Wiesbaden. The relationship between the two men gradually declined upon Riemann’s departure, as did Reger’s state of mind generally.⁷ His remaining years in Wiesbaden would be plagued with depression, alchoholism, financial difficulties, and the failure to gain any wide positive recognition as a composer. His meeting with Straube in the spring of 1898 came just before the mental collapse that necessitated his return to his family home in Weiden.⁸

When Reger did gain some attention—if not success—for his compositions, it was primarily through the efforts of the organist Straube, and Reger’s production of organ music increased dramatically after the two men met in 1898. In part because Reger rose to prominence as an organ composer, and in part because he and Straube actively promoted an image of Reger as the rightful successor to Bach, Reger’s ability to write complicated organ music nourished the assumption that he could play the organ in an equally masterful way. This notion of Reger as an accomplished organist—able to play, say, his own large works or those of Bach—has proven remarkably durable. Already in 1901, Heinrich Lang voiced the assumption that anyone who can compose such difficult music for the organ must be able to play it:

I do not know whether Herr Reger himself is an organist of note, but I would tend to assume so, because his compositions offer the performing artist seemingly unsurpassable difficulties.⁹

Nicolas Slonimsky referred to him as late as 1994 as a ‘formidably industrious and prolific German composer and master organist.’¹⁰ Reger must have demonstrated some practical ability on the instrument; otherwise it is difficult to understand why he would have received appointments to teach organ at the Wiesbaden Conservatory in 1891 (where he was concurrently a student in piano and theory) and at the Munich Academy in 1905.¹¹ On the other hand, we know nothing about his duties in Wiesbaden and only little about them in Munich, but it must say something significant about German conservatory music education if a person of quite limited practical ability and no performance record could be appointed to a teaching position, particularly to a prominent one once occupied by Josef Rheinberger. In the end, though, it is perhaps no less or more reasonable to expect that Reger, on the basis of these appointments, was an accomplished organist than it is to expect that J. S. Bach would have been capable of competently translating Scotus or Quintilian because he taught Latin grammar to schoolboys at Leipzig.

The assumption that Reger was an able organist grew concurrently with another, related tendency to grant him authority in matters of performance practice, especially regarding Bach. In 1910, Walter Fischer appeared before a conference of Westphalian organists, admonishing them to regard registration and rubato indications in certain works of Reger as ‘a hint for the performance of similar organ pieces by Bach,’¹² and a reviewer of Arthur Nikisch’s 1907 production of the St. Matthew Passion BWV 244 at St. Thomas/Leipzig complained of the organ continuo with the aside ‘NB: For the working out and publication of such artful and stylistically faithful organ parts, Max Reger would have been the right man.’¹³ Of course, this idea proved relatively short-lived in the face of a rising movement toward authenticity. It does, however, serve to highlight the need for a thorough examination of Reger’s education regarding the organ and its repertory.

In the summer of 1885, Reger’s father salvaged parts of the Weiden preparatory school’s practice organ, to which Lindner laconically referred as ‘no longer sufficiently fulfilling its purpose,’¹⁴ in order to build a small house instrument. Reger helped his father in what must have been at best a dilettante effort, and Lindner’s exaggerated assertion that with this ‘the foundation was laid for a comprehensive knowledge of organ building which would later serve him well in his own magnificent creations for Cecilia’s noble instrument’¹⁵ should not be taken too seriously. Upon Reger’s entry into the preparatory school in the autumn of 1886, he was able to practice on the single-manual Steinmeyer organ which had replaced the instrument disassembled the previous summer, and shortly thereafter, he took up part-time duties as organist in Lindner’s Catholic Stadtpfarrkirche, ‘at first [playing] various masses and finally the entire Catholic organ liturgy at high mass and at Vespers.’¹⁶ From 1886 through 1888, Reger played masses on Sundays and feast days, as well as regular Vesper liturgies. Such activity would have given him considerable opportunity to improvise, and, although Lindner credited him with having advanced ‘to the BACH fugues of Schumann [op. 60] and pieces by Bach, Mendelssohn, and Liszt,’¹⁷ he seems in fact to have relied heavily upon his ability to extemporize (probably freely, but possibly upon updated versions of Gregorian melodies), especially on high feast days.

When, on high feast days, he allowed his inexhaustible fantasy free reign on the full organ at the beginning and end of the service, one could hear chords and chord progressions of such unprecedented daring that one would likely have searched in vain for them in the harmony books in use at the time.—This harmonic severity reached its zenith, however, after my organist had deeply immersed himself in the tonal world of Richard Wagner. His improvisations became more and more chromatic, dissonance-laden, and often so thick and full of notes, that my poor old bellows pumper could no longer supply the necessary quantity of wind, despite the greatest exertion via the four large, in part already defective, feeder bellows. The pumper sometimes showed a not unreasonable desire to abandon the whole affair in the middle of this cruel labor of Sisyphus.¹⁸

Lindner describes here a keyboard style virtually identical in its harmonic language and its approach to texture (significantly, he does not mention counterpoint) with that Straube confronted in the Suite in E minor op. 16, composed about ten years later. Reger began to teach himself counterpoint during this perio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Reger, Straube, and the Organ: Aspects of the Relationship, 1898-1916
• 2 Reger’s Music and Straube’s Musicianship, 1898-1918
• 3 Reger’s Music under Straube’s Editorship, 1903-1938
• 4 Reger’s Music at the Leipzig Conservatory and Church Music Institute, 1907-1948
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index