Essential Reger
Born in Brand in the Upper Palatinate, Germany, in 1873, Max Reger counts as one of the major exponents of Late Romanticism in music, together with his contemporaries Richard Strauss – whose Bavarian background he shared – and Gustav Mahler, who, like Reger, was an experienced conductor with a penchant for writing long and lushly scored orchestral works. Reger was also an accomplished pianist and organist.
Read more…Over a period of just 25 years – Reger died of a heart attack in 1916 – he created a huge output in all genres of absolute music apart from the symphony - the "Sinfonietta" being the closest he got. He avoided opera, although he composed over 300 songs and a number of choral works.
His style is intensely chromatic – not for nothing did he write a treatise on modulation, i.e. the art of changing from one key to another – and he eschewed clearly-contoured melodic writing in favour of continuously developing prose-like structures, which, like Brahms's, were admired by the Schoenberg circle. His mastery of counterpoint (the manipulation of simultaneous musical lines) derives from Baroque models, notably Bach. His miniatures are rich in melodic invention, but he often used other composers' themes as a hook on which to hang his own variations and overwhelming fugal climaxes.
His appetite for food and drink was legendary, as was the tremendous rudeness he meted out to critics and others who disliked his music.