Reger, Max

Reger, Max – «A Romantic Suite» after J.F. Eichendorff for Orchestra, Op. 125

Reger’s compositional style is not easy to understand or summarize. Within the Brahms vs.Wagner controversy of the late 19th century, Reger clearly came down on the side of Brahms.There is in Reger’s music the constant influence of Brahms-sweeping melodies that areconstructed out of smaller motifs, a predilection for the hemiola, and the reverence of oldercompositional forms. But Reger takes the style of Brahms one step further with a freedom ofmodulation that at times is almost atonal or pan-tonal in nature. Indeed, one of Reger’s mostinfluential works was pedagogical in nature, namely, the Beiträge zur Modulationslehre(Contriubutions to the Study of Modulation) of 1903 in which Reger made the theoretical casewhereby one could seemingly modulate from one key to any other key. Therefore, it was only asmall theoretical step from Reger’s hypertrophic tonality to Schönberg’s “emancipation of the dissonance …

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