[On Johann Sebastian Bach]

Introduction In 1905, the periodical Die Musik issued a questionnaire to artists, teachers, writers, and scholars inside and outside of Germany, requesting responses to the question “What is Johann Sebastian Bach to me, and what does he mean to our time?” [“Was ist mir Johann Sebastian Bach und was bedeutet er für unsere Zeit?”] Th e result was a collection of eighty-seven replies, some of them brief, others of essay proportions complete with footnotes and musical examples, which take up the entire issue of October 1905. Reger’s answer, among the shortest, appears as number 82. According to a detailed Vorbemerkung, the

responses were organized by age of the respondents, oldest to youngest. Th e brevity of Reger’s “essay,” however, does not prevent the emergence of certain themes that are developed at greater length elsewhere in his writings: the nature of progress, the “illness” of contemporary musical culture, German nationalism, the guilt of the critics.