With the cycle Op. 67 Max Reger tied himself directly to Johann Sebastian Bach. The models, the Orgelbüchlein and the Leipzig chorales, are tangible in recurring basic patterns: the opening of a prelude often grows by traditional imitative technique out of motifs from the chorale line, as in “Allein Gott in der Höh’ sei Ehr!”, “Aus meines Herzens Grunde” and “Herzlich thut mich verlangen”. “Christus, der ist mein Leben”, by contrast, is a “coloured” chorale whose upper voice is ornamented above richly harmonised lower parts. The cantus firmus travels through every register, from soprano through tenor to bass, and is occasionally treated canonically, as in “Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend”.
The short pieces did not circulate widely at first; their technical demands are too high for that, despite their brevity. When Reger noticed this he asked several performer friends to take the preludes into their concert programmes, and wrote half-ironically that, in his firm belief in the holiness of the German spirit, he hoped this apparently “old” music would one day become thoroughly “modern” – the return to Bach was surely coming. The first book ranges from miniatures of under a minute to the expansive “Jauchz, Erd, und Himmel, juble!” at the end.
“Talent is the least of it. Work and more work”, Reger insisted: one must slave away to push the rock ever further. The strict standards passed on to him by Hugo Riemann and his other teachers he expected of his own pupils; in Munich, before his appointment to the Akademie der Tonkunst, he built up an exclusive circle of private students. At the centre of their training stood the mastery of polyphonic technique. Joseph Haas, one of his best-known students, reported that Reger’s mind seemed simply inexhaustible in devising instructive contrapuntal exercises, and that only when some hundred fugues had received the master’s “absolution” could a student expect to be allowed to stop this compositional groundwork.
For the organ Reger worked these techniques through in exemplary fashion in the two collections Op. 56 and Op. 85. Contemporaries praised their clarity, brevity and linear counterpoint, which contradicted the image of the “turgid” Reger; in their conception the Four Preludes and Fugues Op. 85 strongly recall the Well-Tempered Clavier. Karl Straube considered them particularly suited to organ teaching and produced a “pedagogical” edition with his own additions on interpretation. The movements turn out very differently: alongside evenly flowing fugues in the stile antico (Nos. 3 and 4), the one in No. 1 is shot through with intense chromatic counterpoint, while the second fugue is cast in a typically scherzo-like manner with subtle, finely detailed articulation. The preludes change character too, from the romantically expressive character piece (No. 1) to the pastoral miniature.
The short Postlude in D minor WoO IV/12, published in 1904 in the Orgelalbum bayrischer Lehrerkomponisten, combines an arpeggiated introduction with a fugato that takes up the opening motifs again towards the end. The volume was recorded from 5 to 7 May 2015 in the Evangelische Kirche in Essen-Werden. The church was built between 1897 and 1900 from numerous donations by Essen industrialists, among them the Krupp family, resident at the nearby Villa Hügel. To match its rich ornament and wall paintings, E. F. Walcker of Ludwigsburg built with Op. 885 an orchestral, symphonic organ in the style of German late Romanticism, despite its comparatively modest size of 35 stops. Alongside the powerful, clear-cut plenum, the two free reeds on the second and third manuals stand out, the Clarinette and the Cor anglais, which lend cantabile quality to solo lines and a colour of their own to ensemble registrations. As one of the few turn-of-the-century organs in what was then West Germany it remained almost unchanged after the war, and in 1990/91 it was comprehensively overhauled by the Karl Schuke workshop (Berlin).