In August 1914, towards the end of his Meiningen period, Max Reger asked several church-musician friends which chorales were the most popular and the most frequently sung in services. Through concerts in smaller churches in Thuringia and as an examiner at the teachers’ seminary in Hildburghausen, he knew the situation of village organists at first hand. By November 1914 the collection Thirty Short Chorale Preludes to the Most Common Chorales for Organ Op. 135a was complete. Reger announced it to Fritz Stein and Karl Straube as “terribly simple”, as “child’s play”; how popular it became is shown, according to Martin Schmeding’s booklet text, by the arrangements for harmonium and piano that appeared soon after publication.
Unlike in the chorale preludes Op. 67, Reger restricts himself here to technically simple settings with an unornamented cantus firmus and a far more objective harmony. Even so, each miniature has its own profile. In “Ach bleib mit deiner Gnade” (No. 1) or “Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr” (No. 2) the handling of the accompanying voices recalls Bach’s chorale harmonisations; in “Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend” (No. 11) the melody lies in the tenor, in “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott” (No. 5) in the bass, and in “Lobe den Herren, den mächtigen König der Ehren” (No. 15) it is treated in canon. “Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir” (No. 4) first presents each line of the chorale unaccompanied in the tenor, while in “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” (No. 21) every line is answered by an echo in melodic inversion. Out of consideration for the organs of small congregations, which seldom had “the latest technology”, the demands on the instrument remain modest, yet the dynamics of the chorale lines often follow the meaning of the text. That Reger published the large-scale Fantasia and Fugue in D minor Op. 135b under the same opus number shows how closely the highest ambition and elevated functional music lay side by side in his output.
The other five works were written for a wide range of occasions. The Prelude and Fugue in D minor WoO IV/10 appeared in 1902 in the Leipzig journal Die Musik-Woche; the Old Dutch Prayer of Thanksgiving for Organ WoO IV/17 of 1915, a simple song setting, was a professional commission. In the Romance in A minor for Organ WoO IV/11 Reger transferred one of his own harmonium pieces to the organ. Adalbert Lindner relates an anecdote about the Prelude in C minor for Organ WoO VIII/6: dissatisfied with organ works by famous contemporaries, Reger offered to write a short festive prelude within a few minutes in return for a fine lemonade. Lindner, his early teacher, later often played it in Reger’s honour on the organ of the parish church in Weiden. Together with the Fugue in C minor for Organ WoO IV/8, also published separately, it forms a unit.
The recordings were made from 28 to 30 September 2015 on three Wilhelm Sauer organs in Lower Lusatia. Chorale Preludes Nos. 1 to 15 were recorded in the late Romanesque church of the former Cistercian monastery of Dobrilugk. Sauer built its organ, Op. 209, as early as 1874 on mechanical cone chests, using pipework by the Dresden organ builder Johann Christian Kayser (c. 1790); alongside Romantic orchestral colours such as the Flûte harmonique and Voix céleste it therefore retains late Baroque features such as numerous 4’ stops and mixtures. Christian Scheffler (Sieversdorf) reconstructed and restored it in 2002. Schmeding played Nos. 16 to 30 and the Romance in the Trinitatiskirche in Finsterwalde, a Renaissance gallery church in the “city of singers”: behind a case modelled on Baroque examples, Sauer built an instrument here in 1908 with 28 stops and a generously planned swell division, very colourful for so small a space. The remaining pieces were recorded in the Baroque church of Stift Neuzelle, whose 1906 organ with 24 stops stands behind a classicist case of 1806; Scheffler restored it between 1999 and 2001. Because of the historic case the upper manual has no swell box, and all dynamic shading comes solely from the finely graded 8’ stops.