ABSTRACT
Introduction “I’ve just completed an essay that will hit like a small bomb; it will appear on 15 October in the ‘Neue Musikzeitung’! In it I have violently settled accounts with the regressives!” (letter of 29 September 1907 in Popp and Shigihara 1995: 203).1 Reger’s words to Henri Hinrichsen announce his intent to take up cudgels against Riemann, in the form of a protracted essay in which he aims to answer his former mentor point by point, and which amounts to the low watermark in what had
been a diffi cult relationship since the mid 1890s. Both the length and the tone of the article suggest the strong feelings bound up in Reger’s relationship with Riemann, and it hardly can be read as an objective response to the latter, who had in any case not mentioned the composer or his music. On 1 April 1907, Reger had taken up duties as University Music Director at the University of Leipzig, where Riemann had been active since 1895. Th e present essay, then, may be read as a kind of declaration of independence at the very time Reger joined the Leipzig faculty, and on the eve of his being granted a professorship by the Saxon king Friedrich August III. Not surprisingly, the essay evinces a confl icted attitude toward academia and scholarship, for which Riemann and his theories serve, in Reger’s mind, as the locus classicus. “My goals diff er so fundamentally from Riemann’s that we will never fi nd common ground artistically,” Reger would write to Fritz Stein in 1909 (letter of 16 July 1909 in Popp 1982: 59).
