THE
REPERTOIRE
As is well known,
the organ had an incomparable hold on Max Reger, for which there were two
reasons: first, it was organists who greeted Roger's music enthusiastically
and continued to feature him prominently on their concert programs even
after 1 945; second, it was his organ works in particular that suddenly
caused Reger's reputation to rise in the musical world around 1 900.
Behind the myth of the organ and organist that in Reger's case
arose and began to be cultivated during the era of the modernist
revolution in particular, there is also a covert tendency to see the
instrument of sacred polyphony as a favored guarantee and symbol of a
continuity and stability sustained by the Christian tradition, as a sort
of pivotal connection to a transfigured past that was thought to
have been lost. Reger's accomplishments in organ music were immeasurable,
and he left behind the most comprehensive and important corpus of organ
music in Germany since Bach. His oeuvre for organ achieved a colossal
influence around the turn of the century that was due to a perspective
from which only an outstanding, decidedly pianistically trained organ
virtuoso (a student of Liszt) could have conceived and written the
eminently technical difficulties of this music.
Reger needed the
myth of the organ for several reasons to prevail as a composer in his
time. His name, however, is also automatically associated with the
tradition of composition that around 1900 sought to achieve
a new and unsuspected flourishing for the world of forms and ideas of
Johann Sebastian Bach. Carl Dahlhaus viewed the late romantic adaptation
and reception of Bach above all in terms of a need for assurance and
confirmation of the musical reality that that era envisioned as its
guiding aesthetic ideal. Along with the political, sociological, religious,
and psychological experiences of crisis in the early twentieth century •
there was a growing tendency to find in Bach's work the stable foundation
of an absolute (contrapuntal) instrumental music whose effect and intellectual
ambition rose beyond language to a conception of the infinite and absolute
(Dahlhaus).
In 1902-03 Max
Reger arranged for organ a total of thirty of Johann Sebastian Bach's
works for keyboard. From Bach's extensive oeuvre for keyboard he chose
fifteen toccatas, preludes, and fantasies and their accompanying fugues,
including what is surely the best-known pair, the Chromatic Fantasy and
Fugue. In addition, he arranged all fifteen Two-Part Inventions as trios
in three parts with obbligato pedal. Roger's Bach arrangements showed him
to be a connoisseur and late romantic interpreter ofJ. S. Bach's keyboard
music. He understood how to employ the extended possibilities of tone
color and performance technique of the organ of his day in order to
clarify the structure of the baroque polyphonic writing. When Reger began
his studies with Hugo Riemann in the spring of 1890, Riemann was working
on a comprehensive analysis and new edition of Bach's Well-Tempered
Clavier. The understanding of form that Riemann conveyed to him formed the
basis for Roger's arrangements of the preludes and fugues from The
Well-Tempered Clavier for organ. Riemann wrote of the Prelude and Fugue in
C-sharp Minor performed on this CD: ... these two pieces are among the
most valuable and most sublime things in the musical literature. The
serious, melancholy C-sharp minor in the Prelude adopts the expression of
grand, noble feeling full of energy and profundity ... The fugue (five-part)
is constructed like an enormous dome, climbing and climbing until the end
and ultimately ... of an almost heart-wrenching power. Riemann's
classification of the baroque prelude as a "character piece" and
the fugue as a "form of intensification" also served as a model
for Roger's arrangements of Bach. Although Reger keeps to Bach's original
notes in the fugue unchanged, and merely tries to make the polyphonic
latticework of parts more transparent by means of playing individual
expositions of themes and their immediate development on special manuals,
in the prelude he intervenes in the original substance by inventing
additional parts and adding some longer phrases in order to give a richer
timbre or more intense polyphony to the particular, orchestrally conceived
ideals while remaining faithful to the baroque movement structure. In an
analogous way the phrasing obtains a greater level of differentiation.
Changes to the original structure of the text are never found in the
fugues but only, if at all, in the free forms. Reger, as a composing
pianist at the piano, wanted to provide new and yet "authentic"
Bach works and thus enrich the repertoire of the concert organist. The
resulting translations are certainly more than a purist reformulation of
the text for keyboard with an eye to elementary perspectives and needs
that are specific to the organ.
The
chamber-music-like arrangements of the fifteen Two-Part Inventions are of
a very different sort, a School for Trio Playing. He wanted these works to
be understood in pedagogical terms and explicitly to call the budding
organist's attention to the woefully neglected trio playing for organ in
order to achieve absolute independence of both hands, both from each other
and from the pedal (cited from Roger's foreword).
Like The
Well-Tempered ClavierReger was introduced to the Inventions in Riemann's
edition. For his arrangements he took over Bach's text by generally giving
the original treble part to the right hand on the first manual and the
original bass to the pedal. He then composed a third, freely imitative
part that is to be played in the middle range by the left hand on the
second manual. Karl Straube, the organist of St. Thomas in Leipzig and
friend of Reger, served as coeditor and provided fingerings and pedalings
for Roger's arrangements.
For organists today,
despite a changed set of aesthetic premises, the performance of Roger's
arrangements can prove to be a rewarding experience. The advantage may be
that Reger's Bach arrangements provide today's performer with an
opportunity to present original music by Bach on the organ in
authentically romantic garb but without being subject to accusations of
having no conception of performance practice. The characteristic forms of
baroque keyboard music are transformed under Reger's competent handling of
structure and timbre into respectable symphonic miniatures; the Inventions
become intelligent organ studies with a chamber music approach.
Wolfram Adolph
