As his health returned during the Weiden years, Max Reger’s need for a public and for recognition grew as well, and he increasingly showed himself a pragmatist. Numerous organists had called his monumental organ works “unplayable”; one of them wrote to tell him so, meaning well. Where Reger had at first responded with rejection, he gradually came to see that a general breakthrough as a composer also required reaching the less practised organists. The publishing house of Peters, which took the place of the London publisher Augener, asked for a sequence of moderately difficult organ pieces — having categorically turned down the monumental works only shortly before. The fifth volume of the Max Reger Edition brings together two of the collections that grew out of this change of direction.
The Twelve Pieces for Organ Op. 59 were written in 1901, while Reger was still in Weiden, and meant a change in his working method. Adalbert Lindner reports that the master wrote all twelve pieces in a fortnight: every evening except Sundays he brought him a piece written out ready for the printer and made him a present of the sheet of the first draft; No. 1 bears the date of 17 June. When Reger announced the collection as the easiest imaginable, there was a degree of coquetry in it. It is a compendium of historical and contemporary forms: the Prelude in E minor, Canon in E major, Toccata in D minor and Fugue in D major reach back to baroque models, the Fugue laid out as a grandiose intensification of dynamics and tempo. Kyrie eleison, Gloria in excelsis, Benedictus and Te Deum provide a repertoire for the Ordinary of the Mass — perhaps a counterweight to the Protestant chorales that otherwise dominate Reger’s organ output. The Pastorale in F major, Intermezzo in A minor, Capriccio in F sharp minor and Melodia represent the Romantic character piece, familiar from Reger’s own shorter piano works.
A recurring element of these smaller organ works is the three-part form with a contrasting middle section and a varied recapitulation. The changing moods correspond to the three traits Lindner described in Reger’s composing: the defiant, titanic and demonic, the humorous and burlesque, and the intimate. Sales and print-run figures show how popular this first collection of character pieces became; the Toccata in D minor is still among the most frequently performed of Reger’s organ pieces, and the Benedictus, in its transfigured mood, counts in the literature, in Bruno Weigl’s words, as one of the composer’s loveliest and most inward works.
Alongside the collections of shorter character pieces, Reger put together the sets of chorale preludes Op. 67 and Op. 79b. As his Op. 79 he had gathered, at first reluctantly and at his publisher’s request, several works for the everyday work of church musicians under the heading “Haus- und Kirchenmusik”; the Compositions for Organ (13 Chorale Preludes) Op. 79b follow on from these directly. They assemble mostly single preludes that Reger had previously written for monthly collections of functional church music, and the chorales are chosen on purely pragmatic grounds: the melodies then best known in organ practice. As in Op. 67, Reger draws on baroque models with fugati, canonic technique and expositions of the melody in soprano, tenor and bass, often recalling Bach’s Orgelbüchlein, while restricting the technical and compositional demands ever further — a path of simplification that would lead as far as the plain chordal settings of Op. 135a.
The volume was recorded from 25 to 27 March 2015 on the Wilhelm Sauer organ Op. 1020 of the Erlöserkirche in Bad Homburg, one of the largest surviving instruments by its builder. In the restoration by the firm of Förster und Nicolaus (Lich) in 1990/91 a fourth manual was added as a second swell division, built on original wind chests from a Wilhelm Sauer organ dismantled nearby, so that the great works of German Romanticism could be performed as well. The echo division serves almost exclusively for effect; some of its stops were built after historical models — the Clarinette, for instance, is a copy of the stop of the same name on the organ of Berlin Cathedral — while others are in the French symphonic style that Wilhelm Sauer took into some of his instruments after a stay in the workshop of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll in Paris. The recording was nominated for the International Classical Music Awards (ICMA).