ABSTRACT
Introduction Max Reger’s only contribution to music theory, his succinct Beiträge zur Modulationslehre, appeared in 1903 with C. F. Kahnt (Reger 1903). Preferring exemplum and imitatio to the byways of academic theoretical discourse, he largely refrains from prose text as such, instead merely supplying one hundred extremely brief four-part musical examples of one or two bars’ length, each demonstrating a particular modulation, using as tonal departures the keys of C major, C-sharp major, A minor, C-fl at major, D-fl at minor, and A-sharp minor, respectively. Each example is supplied with a succinct chordal analysis meant to show the
possibilities of common-chord modulation without recourse to enharmonic reinterpretation. Th e equally brief Vorbemerkung is reproduced here:
Reger’s Beiträge attracted the immediate attention of the musical press. Whereas some reviewers, like Otto Taubmann in the Neue Zeitschrift, would recommend that the book “should be introduced into every theory course” (Taubmann 1903, 655), other writers received it either cooly or with open censure. In January 1904, and again in March of that year, Reger felt compelled to answer certain critical points that had emerged in reviews of the volume. Th e subject of the present essay is a relatively brief assessment, apparently by the Leipzig critic Arthur Smolian (1856-1911), in Vienna’s Neue Musikalische Presse (Smolian 1903).2 Smolian seeks to draw parallels between the advance of technology in speedy ground travel and the “technology” of “modulatory travel” in music. Th e article’s succinctness allows for its full reproduction here:
Although Reger feigned ignorance of Smolian’s identity in his polemical retort, he revealed in a letter to Carl Lauterbach, just before
the appearance of “I Request the Floor!” that he intended to take Smolian to task:
I Request the Floor! In the Neue Musikalische Presse no. 21, pages 377 and 378, there appears a rather lengthy discussion of my little book Beiträge zur Modulationslehre (C. F. Kahnt Nachfolger), which compels me to off er publicly a few supplementary remarks. I emphasize that the Herr reviewer concerned is completely unknown to me by name and personality, and that it is absolutely not my purpose to deliver a “counter-review.” Th e opinion of the Herr reviewer about my little book is a matter of indiff erence to me, after he likens modern harmony and modulation to an automobile gone “crazy,” so to speak, and even more so as it has pleased him to dismiss my little book (a work of admittedly modest scope) with a few witticisms about the modern modulation automobile in a discussion that is certainly earnestly meant, but hardly to be taken so. To renounce curtly a theoretical book like my Beiträge zur Modulationslehre — based on long-standing, personal experience with theory instruction4 and on the clearest views with respect to harmony and modulation — has to be wrong, particularly when one considers what a great, absolutely incalculable role that modulation theory plays in instruction, and this especially in view of modern music! Judging from the tone of the discussion described above, it is not important whether a great number of my modulation examples seem to the Herr reviewer “hardly commendable” due to their “putting beauty at risk through all too abrupt evasive movement.” All the more so, since, as is well known, it is not at all easy to determine the diff erence between the “musically
beautiful” and the “musically ugly,”5 and since the merely relative concept of the “musically beautiful” changes very, very rapidly from year to year. Th e reviewer writes: “Whoever, for example, can approve of such modulations as nos. 6, 19, 27, and 46 of Reger’s book, or of the false relation in no. 26 — certainly ‘a new day must have dawned’ already for his ‘spiritual ears.’” I will not argue with the Herr reviewer about the “abruptness” of my examples nos. 6, 19, 27, and 46; I have absolutely no desire for such an argument. But the example no. 26, which is supposed to contain, in his opinion, such a horrible false relation, appears below:6
(from C major to C-sharp minor)
Th e false relation can only be that between the soprano’s d 2 (third quarter) and the tenor’s d-sharp1 (fourth quarter). Now — I admit tremendous astonishment at seeing this nearly antiquated chord progression stigmatized with such regal indignation as a “false relation” in the year 1903 after Christ.
