Despite his parents’ misgivings, Max Reger began studying theory and composition with Hugo Riemann in the autumn of 1890, first in Sondershausen, then in Wiesbaden. With great zeal he worked his way through the old masters and his contemporaries, above all Johannes Brahms, who became his model both for polyphonic design and for emotional depth. “Fugal form has completely captivated me”, he wrote at the time; in one of his first student concerts he played, alongside his own pieces, Robert Schumann’s fugues on B–A–C–H, which he considered the finest organ music since Johann Sebastian Bach. Any organ music not related at its core to Bach was impossible, he declared – a sentence he did not want understood pedantically.
Reger sent the Three Pieces for Organ Op. 7 to Otto Leßmann, editor of the Allgemeine Musikzeitung, in 1892 with an ironic accompanying note: in these pieces he was putting on a wig and not even forgetting the little braid, he laid no claim to originality, he had merely wanted to write a few solid organ pieces. His London publisher Augener at first rejected the cycle on the advice of the organist William Thomas Best, who found the pieces too serious and not interesting enough for the present day; Peters, too, saw an excessive attachment to tradition. In the end Augener printed them after all. The Prelude and Fugue in C major, exuberantly virtuosic and driving, stands close to Bach’s early organ works, especially BWV 531, whose fugue Reger quotes while spinning out his own theme; the opening motif of the prelude is sequenced exactly fourteen times.
Again and again he breaks the baroque manner open, with gallant, quasi-classical pedal suspensions in the middle of the prelude or with an insertion in “North German free” style in the fugue. The other two pieces of the cycle reach back further still, to the vocal polyphony of the sixteenth century and to Samuel Scheidt and Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. In the Fantasia on “Te Deum laudamus”, the four-part presentation of the Gregorian hymn is followed by a series of elaborate variations with contrary motion, ornamental figuration and fugati whose decorative writing recalls Scheidt’s Tabulatura nova, while the harmony and finely calibrated dynamics bring the music into the present. The Fugue in D minor is a double fugue: Reger first works out both themes separately, in part-writing schooled on Palestrina and Josquin, and before combining them inserts a short toccata full of surprising turns.
From the autumn of 1894 Reger was working on a four-movement organ sonata. After Heinrich Reimann had sharply attacked the works written since Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s Sonatas Op. 65 in a series of articles entitled Orgel-Sonaten. Kritische Gänge, he renamed the piece Suite; he proudly reported to his teacher that Bach had varied the theme of his Passacaglia 21 times, while he himself did so 32 times. The first movement of the Suite in E minor Op. 16 opens with massed chords and dotted rhythms in a quasi-baroque overture style and then presents a comprehensive triple fugue. The Adagio assai leads, with its ornamented melodic line, into the world of the romantic character piece and quotes the chorales “Es ist das Heil uns kommen her”, “Aus tiefer Not” and “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden”; immediately after the greatest cacophonous outburst “Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden” is heard in a single voice before the movement arrives at four-part chorale certainty.
By way of maximum contrast there follows a scherzo-like Intermezzo with unusual registrations and changes of manual, interrupted by a lyrical Trio; the coexistence of the titanic, the lyrical and the cheerfully ironic remained characteristic of Reger’s output. He was especially proud of the closing Passacaglia with its 32 statements – the number points to Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Karl Straube, then organist at Willibrordi Cathedral in Wesel, performed the Suite in Berlin and thereby helped Reger to his breakthrough in the organ world. Reger later arranged two of his own works for organ, the Romance in A minor WoO IV/11 and the Prelude and Fugue in F sharp minor Op. 82 Vol. IV Nos. 1 and 2 from the piano cycle Aus meinem Tagebuch, written in Meiningen in 1912; here his efforts to clarify and simplify his style can already be felt.
Schmeding recorded the programme from 1 to 3 June 2015 on the E. F. Walcker organ, Op. 424, of 1884 in St. Annen, Annaberg-Buchholz. In 1987, after lengthy discussion, the decision there went against demolition and a new instrument and in favour of a renovation, which the Eule workshop (Bautzen) carried out by 1995; all 55 surviving stops were kept, and additions and reconstructions followed original models. One of Germany’s most important instruments with mechanical cone chests thus stands in Saxony’s largest pure late-Gothic hall church, closely related in its basic design to the cathedral organ of Riga built in the same year. For the complete edition Schmeding sought out exclusively historic Sauer and Walcker organs between 2014 and 2016, together with the balance engineer Ingo Schmidt-Lucas.