ABSTRACT
In 1907, as a contribution to the heated conversation about “confusion in music” launched by the Dresden premiere of Richard Strauss’s Salome over a year earlier, Max Reger submitted a short essay — a so-called Open Letter — to Die Musik that addressed the relationship of tradition and innovation in modern music. When the subject turned to his own artistic goals, Reger expressly declined to discuss his own music:
e point is hardly original; many composers before Reger and after him have not particularly enjoyed talking about what they do. But it seems a good point of departure for some thoughts about the composer’s confl icted relationship to the written word, even if his remarks condemn the legitimacy of such an investigation. Reger might well have been horrifi ed that a book, published to the standards of modern musicology, would aim at presenting him as a writer about music. Admittedly, a great number of words are employed here in the name of illumining certain aspects of his person and work — in fact, more than he himself uses in the original writings contained in these pages — and this by way of an academic discipline that he consistently associated with creative bankruptcy and stagnant backwardness, removed from the practical “making” of music that stood, for Reger, at the heart of the matter. But Reger, too, despite his repeated admonitions toward aesthetic rather than historical stances — that is, toward the music itself rather than words about it — produced a massive number of words during his lifetime: thousands of letters and postcards by which the composer, in Susanne Popp’s words, “organized his fame” (Popp 2000: 435); reviews of others’ music written during the 1890s and early 1900s; an idiosyncratic treatise on modulation; and polemical essays on other composers and on the nature of musical progress. By the time of his death, he undoubtedly had plans to produce many more. Apparently at the suggestion of Siegmund von Hausegger, Reger conceived a study on problems in Brahms’s orchestral music, meant as a companion piece to Wagner’s essay on Beethoven (Mueller von Asow 1949: 370-71); as Meininger Hofkapellmeister, he had similar plans to publish his suggestions for more “plastic” renderings of classical orchestral works as addenda to the scores appearing with C. F. Peters (ibid., 38). In 1903, and again in 1905, he entertained the idea of writing a textbook on harmony in the wake of his Beiträge zur Modulationslehre (letters of 29 June 1903, 2 July 1903, and 19 March 1905 in Müller 1993: 171-73 and 462). Seemingly unable to keep to their proper place, words of strikingly rhetorical import occasionally invade even Reger’s scores themselves.
