Almost all the large organ works with which Max Reger shaped the image of a monumental, symphonic organ style were written during his second period in Weiden. After his studies with Hugo Riemann in Wiesbaden and his military service, he had returned to his parents’ house in June 1898 in poor health. There he engaged intensively with literature, with Dante’s “Divine Comedy” as much as with the Lutheran chorales; as Martin Schmeding explains in the booklet, many organ works of these years were written down in a very short time.
The Fantasia and Fugue on B-A-C-H Op. 46 of 1900 is Reger’s homage to Johann Sebastian Bach, for him “the beginning and end of all music”. In the Fantasia the note sequence B-A-C-H is ever present, the germ of sequential intensifications. The Fugue begins calmly and expressively, moves into a freer section on a motoric quaver theme in which the strict five-part writing dissolves, and with the B-A-C-H theme leads back to the chordal opening of the Fantasia; here Reger marked the gradual acceleration with metronome figures for the first time. Josef Rheinberger, the work’s dedicatee, is said to have considered it unplayable.
Reger went further still with the Symphonic Fantasia and Fugue Op. 57, written in less than two weeks in April and May 1901. To its dedicatee Gustav Beckmann he named Dante’s “Inferno” as its inspiration, while refusing to supply “programmes” for his works. Here for the first time he called an organ work “symphonic”: the Fantasia breaks into short sections of changing mood with abrupt changes of colour, and the Fugue joins a burlesque main theme, a lyrical countersubject, a scherzo-like section and the combination of both themes into a “symphony in miniature”. The Introduction and Passacaglia in D minor WoO IV/6 of 1899, today one of his most popular organ works, was by contrast written without fee for an organ album that the organist Ludwig Sauer published in aid of a new organ; any moderately practised organist, Reger wrote, should be able to play the Passacaglia at sight.
After the mixed reception of Op. 57, Reger sought a clearer style, also in connection with his move to Munich. The Second Sonata in D minor Op. 60, completed on 17 December 1901 and dedicated to the critic Martin Krause, engages closely with classical form. Behind the title Improvisation lies a sonata-form movement that already shifts the working-out of its two themes into the exposition. The Invocation leads from a chromatic, cantabile solo voice through a great crescendo to the chorale “Vom Himmel hoch”; the finale combines a scherzo-like Introduction with a strict fugue. The sonata was premiered on Friedrich Ladegast’s organ in Merseburg Cathedral.
Schmeding recorded the works from 22 to 25 March 2014 on the Wilhelm Sauer organ of the St. Petri Dom in Bremen. Sauer built it in 1894 with three manuals and 63 stops and in 1905 added a fourth manual, bringing it to 70 stops. After alterations up to 1939 and after the Second World War, Christian Scheffler restored the original specification by 1996, supplemented by extensions in the builder’s spirit and individual stops from the later rebuilds. This volume launched the Max Reger Edition, for which Schmeding sought out historic Sauer and Walcker organs throughout Germany until 2016. The recording was nominated for the International Classical Music Awards (ICMA); the magazine Diapason awarded it “5 Diapason”.