ABSTRACT
Introduction Reger uses this essay, published on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of Mendelssohn’s birth, not only to discuss the signifi cance of the elder composer’s music but also, as he does in essay 7, “Hugo Wolf ’s Artistic Legacy” of 1904, to disparage the misguided judgment of German critics, audiences, and would-be composers who dismiss
Mendelssohn’s music as simplistic in light of Wagner and Liszt. Indeed, Reger had planned the Mendelssohn article as early as 1904 in the wake of the Wolf essay, and when he wrote to his publishers Lauterbach and Kuhn in late January 1904, he clearly linked the two projects in his mind:
Reger does not develop anything approaching a detailed discussion about the works named in the title; rather, the topic at hand serves as a point of departure for a substantial critique of modern musical culture. It almost need not be said that the essay, which seeks not only to paint Mendelssohn as a composer of “genuinely German music,” but also to associate him on a certain level with Richard Wagner, would have been impossible in the German press only some thirty years later.
