ABSTRACT
Introduction “My Duncan article will become immediately intelligible to you,” wrote Reger to the Berlin organist Walter Fischer,
Th e American dancer Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) had come to Germany already in 1903 and began to present her free, improvisatory dance style there to the accompaniment of the musical “masterworks.” Duncan herself did not have a particularly favorable initial impression of the Germans. She recalled in her autobiography,
Whereas Duncan, during one of her fi rst Munich performances, would be noticed by Siegfried and Cosima Wagner and subsequently invited to dance at Bayreuth, a certain segment of Munich society reacted negatively both to the freedom of her dance and to her use of so-called absolute music as a means to her ends. Eventually, Max Reger entered the fray, siding decidedly with the conservative element against Duncan in what is unquestionably his most creative essay. Although Reger cited the “tone” of the German press as the point of departure for his article, Karl Hasse, who would become Reger’s pupil at Munich, claimed that a short protest written by “Frau Prof. Dr. Quidde” — presumably Margarete Quidde (1858-1940), wife of the historian and eventual Nobel Prize winner Ludwig Quidde (1858-1941) — moved Reger to contribute the fantastic fable of his “On April 1” (Hasse 1921: 172). Th e brevity of Quidde’s article,1 which threatens to lose itself in diatribe, allows for its full reproduction here:
Respectfully yours, Frau M. Quidde (Quidde 1904)
Perhaps as a witty yet earnestly meant answer to Quidde’s fi nal question, Reger’s essay appeared in the Neue Zeitschrift a few weeks later. Th e story Reger fabricates is in itself simple enough, but the details interlaced throughout are unusually important to the context: on 1 April 1904 — the date of the essay’s title — the composer wrote to Karl Straube, “I very much hope that my ‘legend of the big toe’ will please you — but note: there is deep meaning in the whole!”3 (Letter of 1 April 1904 in Popp 1986: 52)
On April 1 Dear Editors. I have just received a very interesting letter, which I permit myself to submit to you below in a word-for-word copy. I ask most respectfully that you do not withhold it from the readers of your very esteemed paper. In view of the constantly growing interest in “bodily worship,” or the art of dance respectively [am “körperlichen Gottesdienst” bezw. an der Tanzkunst], the correspondence has become, so to speak, current news.
