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And there is also the case of Max Reger who was not popular, is not popular, and never will be popular. Can we judge music by academic standards? Certainly not. Even the hoary old academicians themselves can answer this question correctly if you put it in relation to any composer born before 1820. The greatest composers have seldom respected the rules.
Claude Heath came in late with her brilliant husband, whose remarkable musical compositions have not yet attained to the celebrity which will undoubtedly be theirs within no long time. The few who have heard Mr. Heath's music place him with Elgar, Max Reger, and Delius. Then a description of what you were wearing. How very ridiculous and objectionable!" Claude looked furious and almost ashamed.
No doubt, Reger loved the mathematical solidity and balance of the older music, and therefore sought to assimilate it. But he did more than just learn of it, as Brahms had done. He sought to rival the great men of the past on their own ground, to do what they did better than they had done it, to be able to say, "See, I can do the trick, too!"
He went to Nassin, and slept there. For my own share, I did not press him to remain; what I did was rather in the way of form. There were with him President Munchow," civil gentleman whom we know, "an Engineer Captain Reger, and the three Gentlemen of his Court," Wolden, Rohwedel, Katzmer who once twirled his finger in a certain mouth, the insipid fellow.
But poor unimportant forgotten Max Reger also wrote in the most complicated forms; the great Gluck in the simplest. Gluck, indeed, has even been considered weak in counterpoint and fugue. Meyerbeer, it is said, was also weak in counterpoint and fugue. Is he therefor to be regarded as the peer of Gluck? We learn from some sources that music stands or falls by its melody but what is good melody?
Other of his compositions are: "Das Klagende Lied," for soli, chorus, and orchestra; "Das Lied von der Erde," for soli, and orchestra; "Kindertotenlieder," with orchestral accompaniment; "Lieder einer fahrenden Gesellen," with orchestral accompaniment; "Des Knaben Wunderhorn," twelve songs. Max Reger was born in Brand, Bavaria, March 19th, 1873.
One cannot help feeling that he went to the classic masters for their formulas in order to make of composition chiefly a mental exercise, that he accepted so many rules and manners and turns in order to free himself of the necessity of making free and full and spontaneous movements. With Reger, creation becomes routine. His works are stereotyped; stale terribly quickly.
And his publishers placed on the covers of his compositions the design that symbolized the great things they thought the man achieving, and the high heavens for which they believed him bound. The success was momentary only. Long before he died, the world had found in Max Reger its musical bête noire. Closer acquaintance with his art had not ingratiated him with his public.
Debussy's ancestry is not easily traced. Wagner, whom he has amused himself by decrying in the course of his critical excursions, shaped certain aspects of his style. In some of the early songs one realizes quite clearly his indebtedness to the score of Tristan; yet in these very songs say the Harmonie du Soir and La Mort des Amants (composed in 1889-1890) there are amazingly individual pages: pages which even to-day sound ultra-modern. And when one recalls that at the time these songs were written the score of Parsifal had been off Wagner's desk for only seven years, that Richard Strauss was putting forth such tentative things as his Don Juan and Tod und Verklärung, that the "revolutionary" Max Reger was a boy of sixteen, and that Debussy himself was not yet thirty, one is in a position forcibly to realize the early growth and the genuineness of his independence. Adolphe Jullien, the veteran French critic, discerns in his earlier writing the influence of such Russians as Borodine, Rimsky-Korsakoff, and Mussorgsky a discovery which one finds some difficulty in crediting. Later, Debussy was undoubtedly affected, in a slight degree, by César Franck; and there were moments happily infrequent during what one may call his middle period, when a whiff of the perfumed sentiment of Massenet blew disturbingly across his usually sincere and poetic pages. But for traces of Liszt, or Berlioz, or Brahms, one will search fruitlessly. That he does not, to-day, touch hands at any point with his brother musicians of the elder school in France with such, for example, as the excellent and brilliant and superbly unimaginative Saint-Saëns goes almost without saying. With Vincent d'Indy, a musician of wholly antipodal qualities, he disputes the place of honor among the elect of the "younger" school (whose members are not so young as they are painted); and he is the worshiped idol of still younger Frenchmen who envy, depreciate, and industriously imitate his fascinating and dangerously luring art. He has traveled far on the path of his particular destiny; not since Wagner has any modern music-maker perfected a style so saturated with personality there are far fewer derivations in his art than in the art of Strauss, through whose scores pace the ghosts of certain of the greater dead. All that Wagner could teach him of the potency of dissonance, of structural freedom and elasticity, of harmonic daring, Debussy eagerly learned and applied, as a foundation, to his own intricately reasoned though spontaneous art; yet Wagner would have gasped alike at the novelty and the exquisite art of Pelléas et Mélisande, of the Nocturnes, even of the comparatively early Prélude
One great cultural value the professional quartet has for the musical community is the fact that it gives a large circle a measure of acquaintance with the mode of thought and style of composers whose symphonic and larger works are often an unknown quantity. This applies to Debussy, Reger, the modern Russians, Bloch and others.
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