ABSTRACT
Reger submitted the following analysis of the Quartet op. 74 for inclusion in the program book for the May 1904 Tonkünstlerfest of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein in Frankfurt am Main, at which the work was to be premiered by the Frankfurt Museum Quartet. As it happened, that performance was cancelled at the last minute due to the illness of the violist Fritz Bassermann, with Reger’s Violin Sonata op. 72 off ered as a substitute on 31 May. Due to the change of program, Reger was able to prove his point, so often expressed in his essays, about the scandalous blunders of the critics: not realizing that op. 72, rather than op. 74, would be performed, several (eight, according to Reger himself) German papers published reviews of the performance of op. 74, obviously written before the work was premiered, presumably using Reger’s analysis as raw material (postcard of 11 June 1904 to Carl Lauterbach and Max Kuhn in Müller 1993: 328).
