Adalbert Lindner called the Six Trios for Organ Op. 47 (1900) a flower between two abysses, by which he meant the B-A-C-H work Op. 46 and the chorale fantasies Op. 52. Their composer took a more sober view: Max Reger wrote to the organ teacher Karl Wolfrum that he had thought of the trios chiefly as teaching material, and asked him to use them in the advanced organ courses of the Royal Teachers’ Seminary. At first Reger had, as so often, grouped two works of unequal weight under one opus number — the Fantasia and Fugue on B-A-C-H as Op. 46a, the trios as Op. 46b; the publisher Joseph Aibl then issued the trios in early October 1900 as Op. 47.
To the organist Gustav Beckmann, Reger apologised that the work was too insignificant to dedicate to him, adding with his customary irony that the pedal was of course always obbligato — why else does one have legs. In the Monatsschrift für Gottesdienst und kirchliche Kunst, Karl Straube caught the tone of the collection exactly: six model pieces of finesse and grace, in which even humour comes into its own, so far as the organ permits it; one breathes almost the air of the Rococo. The lyrical numbers Canon, Canzonetta and Siciliano are set against three extremely lively, cheerfully ironic movements in Gigue, Scherzo and Fugue. All six are cast in three parts, with an elaborately varied recapitulation, and repeatedly resort to double counterpoint.
With the Twelve Pieces for Organ Op. 80 Reger brought to an end the series of collections of shorter character pieces he had produced during his Munich years. As in Op. 59, Op. 63 and Op. 65 he gathers twelve movements into a cycle; three of them had already been composed for Op. 65 and were held back at the publisher’s request for the later collection — another sign of the pragmatist who cared about the circulation and publication of his works. Harmonically and formally these pieces are far more balanced than the earlier collections; in the booklet Martin Schmeding reads in them Reger’s growing success and the composure it brought, even though the Munich conflicts, among them the quarrel with the New German School around Ludwig Thuille, never receded entirely into the background.
Taken as a whole, Op. 80 is more chamber-musical in character and, in matters of sound above all, less given to eruptive outbursts. Like Op. 59, the collection met with general appreciation soon after publication; Reger’s biographer Guido Bagier praised its constantly new vistas, its attractive deepenings and its harmonic combinations suited to the character of the instrument. Beginning and end of the cycle are each formed by a pair of prelude and fugue: No. 1 Prelude and No. 2 Fughetta in E minor with their gently swaying, melancholy pastoral character, then No. 11 Toccata and No. 12 Fugue in A minor, which in their purposeful virtuosity, harmonic composure and formal rounding rank among the most successful pieces in these collections. Between them stands the most varied material: a Perpetuum mobile with ostinato semiquaver figures, an Intermezzo in odd metre recalling the slow movements of Gustav Mahler, and a heartfelt Ave Maria that bears out Reger’s remark that he was Catholic to his fingertips. Only towards the end of his life, with Op. 129, did he take up the idea of such a collection again.
The recordings were made on 28 and 29 May 2015 on the Wilhelm Sauer organ, Op. 902, of the Michaeliskirche in Leipzig, immediately before those for the tenth volume on the same instrument. Church and organ were built together and completed in 1904, and they form a unity down to the case, whose carved rose bushes and natural forms take up the Art Nouveau of the building. Christian Scheffler (Sieversdorf) comprehensively restored the instrument in 1996–1999; in the booklet Martin Schmeding singles out its wide variety of chamber-music colours. After the destruction of Dresden, Hanns Ander-Donath worked here, organist of the Frauenkirche and a leading interpreter of Bach and Reger. The registrants were Sebastian Heindl, Marie Schmeding, Jihoon Song and Sora Yu. The volume belongs to the complete recording for which Schmeding sought out historic Sauer and Walcker organs throughout Germany between 2014 and 2016; it was nominated for the International Classical Music Awards (ICMA).