RWA Online Blog RWA Band I/2 – Fantasias and Fugues, Variations, Sonatas, Suites I, Introduction

RWA Band I/2 – Fantasias and Fugues, Variations, Sonatas, Suites I, Introduction

Alexander Becker, Stefan König, Christopher Grafschmidt, Stefanie Steiner-Grage

1. Overview

This second volume in the series of organ works includes, in chronological order, the fantasias and fugues, variations, sonatas and suites Max Reger composed between October 1894 and May 1901 in Wiesbaden and Weiden:

  • Suite in E minor op. 16 (1894/95)
  • Fantasia and Fugue in C minor op. 29 (1898)
  • 1st Sonata in F sharp minor op. 33 (1899)
  • Introduction and Passacaglia in D minor WoO IV/6 (1899)
  • Fantasia and Fugue on B–A–C–H op. 46 (1900)
  • Variations and Fugue on The English National Anthem WoO IV/7 (1901)
  • Symphonic Fantasia and Fugue op. 57 (1901)

They can be classified mainly as organ works for concert performance in the “grand style”.1 In these works, Reger pursued his ambitious artistic aims with regard to both compositional technique and aesthetic effect.2 He regarded the organ “indeed as a concert instrument” (letter dated 25 January 1900 to Anton Gloetzner) and proceeded with his compositions on a terrain which, towards the end of the 19th century, appeared both unencumbered by music history as well as in need, and capable of development. Organ music was considered on the one hand “as a relic of bygone times, to which leading composers since Bach’s days had contributed at best individual works ‘in the old style’”,3 and on the other hand, it was a genre which was distant from the factional musical struggles then being contested in orchestral and chamber music.

2. Tradition and modernity

Reger described his intentions and high ambitions in relation to composing for the organ in February 1900 to the reviewer Georg Göhler: “We must […] exploit the achievements of modern organ building – and then employ Bach’s style of composition for the organ! This is what I’m thinking about our German organ style (perhaps of the ‘future’)”.” (Letter dated 10 February 1900 to Georg Göhler)4 This highlights two issues which were to remain relevant throughout Reger’s organ output: a multi-layered orientation towards the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, together with a focus on the innovative possibilities of the modern concert organ. These issues were fully exhausted and expanded through Reger’s works.

Reger’s recourse to Johann Sebastian Bach was both typical of the time and programmatic for his output. For the historicist tendencies at the turn of the century, Bach was both an emblem and a point of reference; in the creative debate about his works this was meant to heal German musical life, perceived as decadent5 – a thought which was expressed especially emphatically by the musicologist and organist Heinrich Reimann: ““Outside this style there is no salvation!” (Orgel-Sonaten, p. 559) Also in Reger’s view of Bach, the pathos of acquisition and the pathos of renewal belonged inseparably together. To his earlier teacher Hugo Riemann, he expressed the hope of being able to achieve a “purposeful, true composing for organ” through progress “based on the Bachian tradition” (letter dated 18 March 1899).

3. Genres and their claim

For the first generation of Reger interpreters around 1900 (Karl Straube, as well as Gustav Beckmann, Karl Beringer, Otto Burkert, Hermann Dettmer, Walter Fischer, Paul Gerhardt, Andreas Hofmeier and Richard Jung), Reger’s large-scale organ compositions represented an opportunity for the development of virtuosity, unprecedented until then, and which the composer sought to expand with each new work. At the same time, the tradition of the organ as the main instrument for church music – “For a church instrument is, and must remain the organ, even if it stands in the concert hall.” (Reimann, Orgel-Sonaten, p. 517) – stood for a stylistic level which composers and interpreters alike felt obliged to do justice to, not least in view of the references to Johann Sebastian Bach.

Because of such linking of claims, for Reger in his organ works in particular, questions of genre became the focus of attention again and again.6 In the letter to Georg Göhler in February 1900, Reger declared “for the innermost aesthetic reasons of the nature of the organ, the form of the choral fantasia is more suitable than the form of the sonata”.” (Letter) Remarkably, Reger nevertheless made several attempts at the form of the organ sonata, with gaps of a few years between each attempt, though he avoided the traditional sonata form of piano music and instead, in accord, for example, with the models of Heinrich Reimann, intended to fall back on the ““purely organ-like forms of the free fantasia, the variation, fugue, passacaglia […] of the hymn and the chorale”.7 Following opp. 16 and 33, with the 2nd Sonata in D minor op. 60 in 1901 Reger published a further work, again with another cyclical structure, whereas he had previously canonized and ultimately exhausted the genre of the choral fantasia in seven contributions to an almost self-contained group of works.8

In his compositions not based on chorales, Reger used both the baroque and classical-romantic repertoire of forms. In opp. 29, 46 and 57 he used the sequence of fantasia and fugue which he again returned to in 1915 in op. 135b. Combinations of a free introductory movement with linked forms, such as fugue and/or passacaglia are found in both the cyclical opp. 16 and 33 and as a pair of movements in WoO IV/6; in addition, opp. 16 and 33 each contains a three-part Intermezzo which also draws on the classical-romantic tradition in form and expression. WoO IV/7 and op. 73, composed in 1903, combine classical variations on a theme with a concluding fugue; opp. 16 and 60 contain the sequence introduction and fugue, and the three-part op. 127 written in 1913 comprises Introduction, Passacaglia and Fugue together.

At the same time, the chosen forms are in close relationship to the “principle of intensification and greatest possible development of the sound”,9 which lends something of the monumental to Reger’s organ works, particularly in the apotheosis-like structure of the fugues. However (at the latest, starting with the Weiden organ works), the effect of the “differentiated, yet jagged” 10 musical text catches the eye and counteracts its compositional subtlety, grasping all the parameters of composition and, in turn, referring dynamically back to the form.11 Form and genre were for Reger a “basis which can be ornamented, intensified and outdone”.12 This resulted not least from Reger’s claim, with his large-scale organ works, to be continuing a tradition anchored in the music of Bach and extending it into his own time, thus founding a tradition himself.

1
Here Reger refers to op. 29.
2
See, among others, Burkhard Meischein, Aspekte der Weidener Orgelwerke Max Regers, in Reger-Studien 6, p. 337.
3
Susanne Popp and Susanne Shigihara, Max Reger. Am Wendepunkt zur Moderne. Ein Bildband mit Dokumenten aus den Beständen des Max-Reger-Instituts, Bonn 1987 (= Schriften des Arbeitskreises selbständiger Kultur-Institute, Vol. 7), p. 51.
4
See also letter dated 10 January to Gustav Beckmann.
5
See, among others, Walter Frisch, German Modernism. Music and the Arts, Berkeley et al 2005, pp. 138–144 (Chapter “Bach, Regeneration, and Historicist Modernism”).
6
See Hermann Danuser, Im Spannungsfeld zwischen Tradition, Historismus und Moderne. Über Max Regers musikgeschichtlichen Ort, in Reger-Studien 4, p. 139.
7
Lindner 1922, p. 164.
8
On the chorale fantasias see Vol. I/1 of the Werkausgabe; on the fantasias and fugues, variations, sonatas and suites from op. 60 see Vol. I/3.
9
Susanne Popp, Bindung und Freiheit. Max Regers Introduktion, Passacaglia und Fuge für zwei Klaviere op. 96 im Kontext, in Rezeption als Innovation. Untersuchungen zu einem Grundmodell der europäischen Kompositionsgeschichte, Festschrift für Friedhelm Krummacher zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Bernd Sponheuer, Siegfried Oechsle and Helmut Well, with the collaboration of Signe Rotter, Kassel et al 2001 (= Kieler Schriften zur Musikwissenschaft, Vol. XLVI), p. 434.
10
Christoph Wünsch, Phantasie und Fuge über B-A-C-H für Orgel op. 46 von Max Reger – motivische, harmonische und formale Disposition, in Reger-Studien 7, p. 156.
11
On aspects of monumentality and subtlety in Reger’s organ works from the Weiden period see Meischein (see note 2), p. 339f.
12
Susanne Popp, article Reger, Max, in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik, 2nd edition, ed. Ludwig Finscher, Personenteil Vol. 13, Kassel et al 2005, col. 1423.
About this Blogpost

Authors:
Alexander Becker, Stefan König, Christopher Grafschmidt, Stefanie Steiner-Grage

Translations:
Elisabeth Robinson (en)

Date:
15th December 2011

Tags:
Module IVol. I/2

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Citation

Alexander Becker, Stefan König, Christopher Grafschmidt, Stefanie Steiner-Grage: RWA Band I/2 – Fantasias and Fugues, Variations, Sonatas, Suites I, Introduction, in: Reger-Werkausgabe, www.reger-werkausgabe.de/rwa_post_00045, last check: 14th November 2024.

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