Max Reger - a lieder composer of substance.
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
Now, as promised for several months, some thoughts on the lieder of Max Reger, as presented by Michael Raucheisen and the singers of his ‘Lied der Welt’ project.
The first thing to say, is that he seems to have been incredibly hard working; he was certainly very prolific, producing 147 opus numbered works in his relatively brief twenty five year composing career. He was 47 when he died.
Johann Baptist Joseph Maximilian Reger (19 March 1873 – 11 May 1916) was a German composer, pianist, organist, conductor, and academic teacher. He worked as a concert pianist, a musical director at the Leipzig University Church, a professor at the Royal Conservatory in Leipzig, and a music director at the court of George II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen.
So, as well as having a prodigious composing career, Reger was also a concert performer of renown and a much sort after teacher. He also seems to have been a committed beer drinker and an enthusiastic trencherman. He was a very large man and had problems with a heart condition from his early 40’s onwards. Given all this, his early death is hardly a surprise, but one wonders how much more he might have written if he had lived out his three score years and ten.
Reger wrote over 250 songs, which have never been popular with British singers, nor German ones, for that matter. Commentators cite the problem of the overuse of chromaticism which gives a knotted, unspontaneous feel to some of the songs, a trait that became more pronounced in Reger’s later work. That having been said, some of the earlier songs are far more straightforwardly attractive. Of the 42 songs in the Raucheisen collection, ‘Im April’ impresses in a richly expressive account by contralto Emmi Leisner and ‘Das kleinste Lied’ is beautifully sung by tenor Walther Ludwig. Later songs find some of the singers struggling with the jagged vocal lines, tenor Lorenz Fehenberger having a particularly torrid time with ‘Nachtgang’ and ‘Gleich einer versunken Melodie’. The young Elisabeth Schwarzkopf is far more assured, but for me, the most successful performer in the Raucheisen edition is baritone Karl Wolfram who is gravely expressive in a number of intensely serious songs such as ‘Ein Paar’, ‘Gute Nacht’ and ‘Gebet’. Sadly, even this sterling artist can do little with the empty, cacophonous bombast of ‘Wir Zwei’. Overall though, I feel Reger has been rather hard done by and his songs deserve a wider audience, an impression reinforced by listening to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s Reger recordings from the 1960’s, ‘Nelken’ and ‘Gluckes genug’ being particularly attractive.
I feel I would have liked Max Reger. I have nothing concrete on which to base this opinion but a photograph taken with his young daughter mirrors one I had taken with my son Hugo when he was a similar age. I also appreciate this anecdote:
Reger had an acrimonious relationship with Rudolf Louis, the music critic of the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, who usually had negative opinions of his compositions. After the first performance of the Sinfonietta in A major, Op. 90, on 2 February 1906, Louis wrote a typically negative review on 7 February. Reger wrote back to him: "Ich sitze in dem kleinsten Zimmer in meinem Hause. Ich habe Ihre Kritik vor mir. Im nächsten Augenblick wird sie hinter mir sein!" ("I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me.”)
And finally:
Arnold Schoenberg was an admirer of Reger's. A letter he sent to Alexander von Zemlinsky in 1922 states: "Reger...must in my view be done often; 1, because he has written a lot; 2, because he is already dead and people are still not clear about him. (I consider him a genius.)"
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