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One is ever conscious in Reger that he is solving contrapuntal problems in order to astonish the vulgar herd of the professors. Reger certainly knew the art of talking with an astonishing show of logic, and yet saying nothing. Perhaps he talked continuously in order not to have to reflect. And for all his erudition, he understood his masters intellectually only.
And while the ensemble spirit must be preserved, the freedom of the individual should not be too much restrained. Once the style and manner of a modern composer are familiar, it is easier to present his works: when we first played the Reger quartet here some twenty years ago, we found pages which at first we could not at all understand.
Not that there was a paucity of bespectacled doctors of music who felt themselves called to compose "classical" works. But the content of their work was invariably formal. Reger, however, seemed able to effect a union between the modern spirit and the forms employed by the masters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
And in his music there is almost always the consolation of the great forests, the healing of the trees and silences, the cooling hands of the earth, the everlasting yea-saying to love and beauty, the manly resignation, the leave-taking from dreams and life. All this music says, "Song is enough." But no such goodly presence glimmers through the music of Max Reger.
The living man is buried under the mass of badly assimilated learning. In him, education had produced the typical pedant, a pedant of Cyclopean muscularity, perhaps, but nevertheless a pedant. And so, instead of being Brahms's successor, Reger is to-day seen as the very contrary of Brahms.
But Schönberg, Reger, Ravel quartets make too great a demand on the technical ability of the average quartet amateur. "Naturally, the first violin is the leader, the Conductor of the quartet, as in its early days, although the 'star' system, with one virtuose player and three satellites, has disappeared.
The Wagner-Liszt tradition of music-drama, so-called, and the symphonic poem have been continued with personal modifications by Richard Strauss; Max Reger has pinned his faith to Brahms and absolute music, though not without a marked individual variation.
Above all, the stylistic severity of Brahms in Reger has become a confusion of styles; an absence of style. The classic has become the baroque. Reger is one of the men who develop muscles that hamper all grace and freedom of activity.
Besides these most important degree celebrations, there were less dazzling affairs, such as birthday parties, dinners, or afternoon coffee in honor of visiting German parents, or merely meeting together in our favorite café after a Socialist lecture or a Max Reger concert.
Whereas it is probable that Richard Strauss would have deteriorated no matter how friendly the age in which he lived, that Reger would have been just as much a pedant had he been born in Paris instead of in Bavaria, that Schoenberg would have developed into his mathematical frigidity wherever he resided, it is possible that Mahler's fate might have been different had he not been born in the Austria of the 1860's.
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