Reger’s friend and biographer Fritz Stein described the state in which the composer found himself after his physical and mental breakdown at the end of his Wiesbaden years: through all the highs and lows of being human and experiencing God streams the soul of the struggling artist beset by demonic powers. Back in his parents’ house in Weiden, Reger grappled with existential questions; the texts of the Protestant hymns offered him a wealth of statements on them. Around the time of the chorale fantasies he was reading Tolstoy and Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken.
That he planned his last chorale fantasies as a trilogy from the outset is shown by a card of 24 June 1900 to Alexander Wilhelm Gottschalg: Opus 51 will be 3 chorale fantasies in a grand style. Only the choice of chorales was still open. A scathing review by Georg Göhler, who accused him of a lack of inner necessity and of inventive weakness, may well have accelerated the work. His former teacher Adalbert Lindner reports that Reger threw the finished fantasies onto the grand piano with the words: in there is the Reger of no imagination and no invention.
The three pieces form a unified dramatic entity. The torn motivic writing and deep depression of Alle Menschen müssen sterben are followed by the gradual emergence from night to light in the vision of resurrection of Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, which leads into the light and airy fugue and the closing jubilation of the eternal canticle of Halleluja! Gott zu loben, bleibe meine Seelenfreud’!. Barely a month passed between the completion of the first two fantasies at the beginning of September 1900 and the announcement that the whole cycle was finished.
As a counterweight, the lyric tone piece Liebestraum WoO III/7 of 1898, written for piano or organ, closes the programme — four minutes that set a deliberately intimate tone against the monumental chorale fantasies.
St Nikolai is the largest church in Leipzig and houses Saxony’s largest organ. Friedrich Ladegast built it in 1862 — it was on his organ in Merseburg Cathedral that Reger’s Second Sonata had been premièred. Wilhelm Sauer later rebuilt and enlarged the instrument, so that his hand is audible here as well; the most recent work was carried out by Eule in 2004.
The recording was made from 15 to 18 May 2016 on this organ; Sauer’s enlargement dates from 1902/03. The complete edition was nominated for the International Classical Music Awards. The hybrid SACD runs to 58:28 in stereo, 5.1 surround and 3D binaural stereo; the booklet has 58 pages in German and English. The production was supported by the Max-Reger-Institut / Elsa-Reger-Stiftung.