1.

2.

About creation and publication of Op. 76 vol. I see here.

Without any delay, Reger now began to expand his collection of “simple songs”. The initial follow-up collection, which also comprised seven songs (thus nos. 8–14), must have been composed soon after, because he and Sophie Rikoff were able to give the first performance of the Bavarian dialect song Mei Bua“ (“My boy”, text by Otto Sommerstorff) as early as 29 April 1904. The occasion was the first concert of the newly founded Munich chapter of the ADMV, given in the Kaim Hall in Munich. It was probably performed alongside another one of his new set of songs, all of which were still in manuscript.¹ Reger sent the engraver’s copies of his new songs to his publisher on 5 June, and again proposed a fee of 400 marks.² This time, Lauterbach & Kuhn wanted to publish the songs both as individual numbers and in volume form.³ For the latter, Reger initially intended to include only a selection⁴ of his Schlichte Weisen, but after consulting with his publisher, it was decided to include all 14 songs that he had thus far composed.⁵ When Reger returned the proofs on 30 June, he asked that he be allowed – as an exception to the usual rule – “to keep the manuscripts of op. 76 nos. 8–14 here, because several singers would like to begin studying them now for the coming winter season” (Postcard to Lauterbach & Kuhn of 30 June 1904). He hoped that the songs might appear in print by August. On 16 July, however, Lauterbach & Kuhn received reworked copies of “3 newly engraved Schlichte Weisen” from Reger. (Postcard to Lauterbach & Kuhn) It is unclear whether these were corrected copies of songs that had already been printed and that had contained mistakes, or whether this was in fact a further instalment of the Schlichte Weisen that had been put on hold. The first volume of the Schlichte Weisen underwent a final expansion with the inclusion of the song Maiennacht (“May night”), whose manuscript Reger personally handed over to Carl Lauterbach on 5 August. (see postcard to Max Kuhn of 5 August 1904) By early October, the first volume of the Schlichte Weisen, op. 76 nos. 1–15 was on the market, alongside individual issues of nos. 8 to 15.⁶

In spring 1905, Reger worked on the next instalment of his series. On 2 May, he wrote that he had “also composed new ‘Schlichte Weisen’ [...] – these are better than the ones that have already been published!” (Postcard to Karl Straube of 2 May 1905) He promised his publishers >“15 more pieces”, which he aimed to send to them “by the end of June for sure.” (Postcard to Lauterbach & Kuhn of 6 May 1905) On 15 June, he reported to them: “They have been finished for a long while; but I still have to look through them carefully!” (Postcard to Lauterbach & Kuhn of vom 15 June 1905) The Schlichte Weisen nos. 16–30 were finally sent off to Leipzig on 5 July. Reger asked for the proofs to be produced quickly, and also requested “a specimen copy” (Postcard of 5 July 1905 to Carl Lauterbach), probably for rehearsal purposes. He had earned 800 marks for nos. 1–14, but the considerable market success of the songs prompted his publisher to offer him a total fee of 1,875 marks for the second volume. Reger nevertheless decided to accept less. (“I will in no wise take more than 1500”; Letter to Lauterbach & Kuhn from vom 3 July 1905) When he received the proofs, Reger felt certain that the “[...] ‘merry’ numbers in the new ‘Schlichte Weisen’ will do especially well: and after all, there are 6 merry ones among them!” (Postcard to Lauterbach & Kuhn of vom 16 July 1905) Correcting the proofs proceeded swiftly. By early September, Reger had already received his author’s copies of the first edition;⁷ as before, the songs were published both individually and together in a single volume.⁸

Eight of the 15 Schlichte Weisen in this second volume were dedicated to women either from Reger’s family circle or from among his acquaintances. In addition to Reger’s wife Elsa (Vorbeimarsch, “March-past”, no. 30 ) and his sister-in-law Erika von Bagenski (Des Kindes Gebet, “The child’s prayer”, no. 22), he also used his dedications to pay tribute to his wife’s childhood friends Elly Kleinschmidt (Kindeslächeln, “A child’s smile”, no. 27) and Hedwig Michels (Schmeichelkätzchen, “Endearing kitty”, no. 29)⁹, his Berlin acquaintance Emmy Bock (Friede, “Peace”, no. 25), his business partner Louise Wolff – who was assigned the dedication of the humorous song Die Mutter spricht (“Mother speaks”, no. 28) whose piano part echoes Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s Wedding March¹⁰ – and the wives of both his publisher and his piano supplier, Marie Lauterbach (Glück, “Happiness”, no. 16) and Elma Ibach (Abgeguckt, “Learnt by watching”, no. 24).

Right at the beginning of his song project in the “folk style”, Reger wrote to his publishers and his friend Straube with an urgent appeal: “you 3 gentlemen, when possible, should provide me with folk song texts, in other words similar texts that I could compose for the further instalments of the ‘Schlichte Weisen’!”¹¹ Reger initially oriented himself on the songs that had been published as a result of Scherl’s competition, thoroughly intending to compose parallel settings; he also utilised several other folk song texts that he occasionally took from works by other composers.¹² But he also chose some contemporary texts. The poets Martin Boelitz and Richard Braungart, both of whom were friends of Reger’s, contributed a total of seven original poems or transcriptions of dialect poetry that they probably wrote especially for his Schlichte Weisen.¹³ In the case of Glück (no. 16) by Ernst Ludwig Schellenberg, decades later a member of the Bamberg Poets’ Circle, Reger had presumably also received the poem in manuscript direct from its author. ¹⁴ Other new poems that Reger set in his Schlichte Weisen were penned by Josef Huggenberger and L. Rafael (das ist Hedwig Kiesekamp).

2.

Translation by Chris Walton.

Reger did not have to wait long to enjoy the success he had predicted for the Schlichte Weisen. In their first catalogue for 1905, Lauterbach & Kuhn were able to confirm that the previous winter season had seen performances of “Wenn die Linde blüht” op. 76 no. 4 alone in 21 cities in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and England; “Waldeinsamkeit” and “Mein Schätzelein” (“My darling”), nos. 3 and 14 respectively), had each been performed in 20 cities, “Beim Schneewetter” (“In snowy weather”, no. 6) in 12.¹ Apart from the tenor Ludwig Hess from Berlin (the dedicatee of the Seventeen Songs op. 70), it was almost exclusively women singers who were responsible for introducing the Schlichte Weisen to the concert hall. The most notable advocates of songs from opus 76 were the singers Clara Rahn, Amalie Gimkiewicz, Sanna van Rhyn and Ottilie Hey. As of 1905 they were joined by Lula Mysz-Gmeiner, Adele Münz and Gertrud Fischer-Maretzki. It was Sophie Rikoff, however, who had been the first to sing any of these songs, on 29 April 1904 at the concert of the Munich chapter of the ADMV that had been conceived as a “Reger evening”, and which was followed attentively by the partisan members of the Munich School. The Symphonic Fantasy and Fugue op. 57 op. 57 for organ provoked opposition in the hall, as did the first performance of the Clarinet Sonata in f-sharp minor op. 49 no. 2, but the six Schlichte Weisen, two of which Rikoff sang from the manuscript, were praised. In Der Sammler, Theodor Göring admitted that “a genuinely popular tone is achieved brilliantly here without any lack of ‘high art’ in their conception”², while Rudolf Louis felt that they showed “Reger perhaps not at his most individual, but certainly from his most amiable side.”³ Edgar Istel, a former pupil of Reger’s, brusquely dismissed the Clarinet Sonata (“disconsolate emptiness and a lack of invention”), but with regard to the Schlichte Weisen he admitted that: “[...] some of the pieces are wellnigh popular in tone. So he can also do things that way – if he wants to.”⁴ When Clara Rahn sang Waldeinsamkeit and Mein Schätzelein in a concert at the “Bayerischer Hof” hotel in Munich on 30 October 1904, accompanied by Reger on the piano, an unnamed reviewer in Der Sammler wrote: “To the ultra-modernists, these newer pieces by Reger might seem insignificant or reactionary; I see in them only a path back to Nature.”⁵ In view of this unanimity on the part of the critics, which was unusual for Reger, he himself remarked: “Everyone is taking the bait (the ‘s.W.’); it’s uproariously funny!”⁶

This strategy of using the Schlichte Weisen as a kind of ‘joker card’ to win over his listeners was one that Reger employed many times at concerts of his music, and especially before performances of his more demanding works. For example, when his Sinfonietta op. 90 was first given in Essen on 8 October 1905, Reger devised a mixed programme featuring works by Bach and Mozart alongside two blocks of his own songs, performed by Adele Münz: “[...] she will naturally only sing Reger there (to my accompaniment); [...]; in the first block she will sing 4 serious, big songs; in the second block: ‘Schlichte Weisen’ (about 5–6 pieces); these will delight the audience; we will naturally make a splendid selection of songs.”⁷ The popularity of the Schlichte Weisen in the concert hall seems also to have had a knock-on effect on the sale of the sheet music. In November 1904, shortly after the first volume of the songs was published, Reger was able to report to a music dealer “that a local firm sold 300 marks’ worth of this work in 1 month!”⁸ Lauterbach & Kuhn had the foresight to plan for a correspondingly large print run. A note on Reger’s handwritten draft for the title⁹ indicates that 4,200 copies of the first volume (i.e. nos. 1–15) were printed.

The first reviews of the music began appearing when the individual songs nos. 1–7 were published. Some of them were written at Reger’s own request by friends of his. They included performers such as Walter Fischer, the organist at the Neue Garnisonkirche in Berlin, who specialised in playing Reger’s music, and Georg Stolz, the cantor and organist at St Luke’s Church in Chemnitz. In his review for the Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung, Fischer wrote: “These songs are so straightforward and easy that the amateur will enjoy them, and yet they are so profoundly conceived that the most cosseted person will find enough things of interest in them.” He noted, however, that they remained “art songs” in character: “We would not get very far in our consideration of these songs if we were to put them under the microscope of a folk song researcher.”¹⁰ Georg Stolz, writing in the Allgemeine Zeitung in Chemnitz, similarly emphasised that “Reger always remains himself, despite his exercise in moderation here”, and he added that the Schlichte Weisen “naturally have nothing in common with ‘folksiness’ in the worse sense of the word.”¹¹

In his review of the first volume of op. 76 (nos. 1–15), Arno Kleffel of the journal Der Klavier-Lehrer wrote that the word “schlicht” in the title was “a supposed attribute that one should take with a grain of salt”, since “by far the greater number [of the songs] is complex in texture and can hardly be called ‘simple’.”¹² We find many similar assessments in the reviews of the second volume of the Schlichte Weisen. Karl Thiessen, for example, wrote as follows in the Musikalischen Rundschau: “The epithet ‘schlicht’ does not mean anything like ‘easy’. On the contrary. Sometimes, very high demands are made of the singer’s intonation and ability to cope with intervals.”¹³ Hermann Teibler, the critic of the journal Die Musik, also recommended that “we should approach the designation ‘schlicht’ [...] with some caution. Even for those who are good musicians, this collection contains songs that already lie beyond good and evil.”¹⁴ Franz Rabich offered an enthusiastic review of the Schlichte Weisen in the Blätter für Haus- und Kirchenmusik (their “content can make the most sombre hypochondriac happy”), though he added: “if one does not have an artist at the piano, these showpieces of musical humour can never quite come properly into their own.”¹⁵

Reger’s choice of texts, however, was subject to criticism. The somewhat utilitarian poems that Martin Boelitz and Richard Braungart had written especially for the Schlichte Weisen were in particular deemed too trivial by the reviewers. Teibler complained that “Reger is at times not very critical in his choice of poetry, just as he sometimes provides apparel that is far too exotic for material that would actually be suited to truly ‘simple’ musical treatment.”¹⁶ Gustav von Lüpke, the music director of Katowice, was even more direct in his review for the Kunstwart in April 1907. He welcomed the “pleasing endeavour to reduce complexity, [...] to write music for today and not for the future.”¹⁷ However, the stylistic discrepancies among the poems that Reger set to music prompted him to write of “the danger of a dualism between ‘a song for music-making’ and a ‘tone poem’, which today almost requires a dual aesthetic in song composing.” He recommended that Reger should “adhere strictly, ruthlessly to the old commandment: Thou shalt set only good poems to music!”¹⁸ Reger’s primary concern, by contrast, was to find texts that could trigger music in him, which meant that such principles were foreign to his nature. In a letter to his publishers, he complained about a similar criticism from Rudolf Louis: “The villainy of Dr R. Louis has now reached its highpoint in that he miserably lambasts the texts of the new ‘Schlichte Weisen’ in order to spoil people’s taste for the music, after he can no longer condemn anything more about the music itself!”¹⁹

From a very early date, Reger set about getting his Schlichte Weisen more widely known by transposing them into different keys for different voice types.²⁰ In July 1904, for example, he asked Lauterbach & Kuhn to make “a transposition into G major of ‘Du meines Herzens Krönelein’ op. 76 no. 1 [...] at my own expense”²¹ presumably with a specific singer in mind. Reger had originally designated all the songs of his Schlichte Weisen somewhat indiscriminately as “for medium voice”, but in the spring of 1906, both publisher and composer decided to bring out all the hitherto published songs of the set (nos. 1–30) in versions for lower voice too. Reger selected the keys to be used, and while the transcriptions themselves were made by the publisher, Reger did ask to be involved in the correcting process,²² and also wanted English and French singing translations added.²³ He corrected the copyist’s manuscripts and returned them to the publisher in two instalments, on 2 and 15 June, but expressed his dissatisfaction with the copyist’s work: “for example, he has even transposed incorrectly in the voice part.”²⁴ He added: “I have improved everything in pencil; but I ask you to check the corrections of the edition for low voice of op. 76 with the utmost precision, so that no mistakes are made.”²⁵ In August, Reger also edited the proofs.²⁶ These transpositions for low voice were published the following November in two volumes, analogous to the original edition for medium voice.²⁷ English texts by Edward Oxenford were underlaid in these editions, but it was decided to forgo translating the songs into French.

At the same time as the two volumes for low voice were published, Waldeinsamkeit (no. 3) was also brought out in an edition for high voice. But no complete edition of the Schlichte Weisen for high voice was undertaken, presumably because the resultant tessitura would have been awkward for amateurs in a domestic setting. In early August 1908, Reger remarked to his publisher that “I agree completely with what you wrote to me about transposing the ‘Schlichte Weisen’ volumes I [and] II”²⁸, and he was probably here referring to their decision to transpose merely a selection of songs for high voice. However, such an edition – comprising six songs – was only published after Reger switched publisher to Ed. Bote & G. Bock in 1909.²⁹ After 1910, the other songs were also published in editions for high voice,³⁰ while volumes III and IV of the Schlichte Weisen (nos. 31–36 and 37–43) were published in September 1907 and 1909 respectively in editions for medium, low and high voice from the outset.

In November 1904, shortly after the publication of the first volume of op. 76 and just before the publication of the arrangement of the Minnelied in the Eight Songs for male voice choir opus 83, Reger announced his intention to “arrange whatever is suitable from the ‘Schlichte Weisen’ [...] for mixed choir (to be as easily singable as possible).”³¹ For the moment, this remained in the realm of intention; Reger only revisited the idea in early 1908. But when it finally came to making these arrangements of a small “selection of the easiest [pieces]”,³² Reger did not actually do the work himself, but entrusted it to the pianist Henriette Schelle, a friend of his from Cologne. She arranged the three songs Mein Schätzelein (“My darling”), In einem Rosengärtelein (“In a rose garden”) and Minnelied (nos. 14, 18 and 21), Reger authorised them by declaring himself to be “completely satisfied in every respect [...]”,³³ and they were published in the following October.³⁴ Further arrangements of the Schlichte Weisen were published subsequently, though these were made by the composer himself: Glück and Des Kindes Gebet (nos. 16 and 22) were published alongside Aeolsharfe op. 75 no. 11 and two further songs in the summer of 1914 in versions for voice and orchestra,³⁵ while the Zwölf kleine Stücke nach eigenen Liedern ("Twelve Little Pieces after Songs by the Composer") for violin and piano op.103c, arranged by Reger in February 1916, exclusively comprise transcriptions from the Schlichte Weisen, including nine from the first two volumes.³⁶

2.

Translation by Chris Walton.

Der Edition liegt als Leitquelle der Erstdruck (Einzelausgaben und Bandausgabe) zugrunde. Referenzquellen sind die Stichvorlagen sowie – mit Vorbehalt – der von Reger Korrektur gelesene Erstdruck der transponierten Ausgaben für tiefe Stimme (siehe ausführliche Quellenbewertung zu Opus 76 Bd. I). Die Quellen der Einzelausgabe von Nr. 21 in den Süddeutschen Monatsheften (Stichvorlage und Erstdruck) weisen auf Ebene der Vortragsanweisungen gegenüber dem späteren Druck in Opus 76 große Unterschiede auf und sind für die Edition daher kaum aussagekräftig. Keine Rolle spielten die transponierten Ausgaben für hohe Stimme, der Neudruck von Nr. 25 im Kunstwart sowie nicht zuletzt aufgrund der instrumentenspezifischen Idiomatik Regers eigene Fassungen für vierstimmigen Männerchor (Nr. 21), Singstimme und Orchester (Nr. 16, 22) sowie Violine und Klavier (Nr. 16, 18 und 25). Auch die von ihm autorisierten Bearbeitungen von Henriette Schelle von Nr. 18 und 21 für gemischten Chor war für die Edition nicht relevant.
Zur Edition der Erstfassung von Nr. 21 in D-dur siehe Anhang.

• Autograph Nr. 21, Erstfassung (in D-dur) (A)
• Stichvorlage Nr. 21 für (SV-Z)
• Inhaltsverzeichnis für Bandausgabe
• Stichvorlage Nr. 16 (SV)
• Stichvorlagen Nr. 17–22, 24–25 und 29–30 (SV)
• Stichvorlagen Nr. 23, 26–27 (SV)
• Stichvorlage Nr. 28 (SV)
• Erstdruck Nr. 21 als Zeitschriftenbeigabe (ED-Z)
• Erstdruck Einzelausgaben Nr. 16–30 (ED-E)
• Erstdruck Bandausgabe Nr. 16–30 (ED-S)
• Erstdruck für tiefe Stimme Nr. 16–30, Einzelausgaben und Bandausgabe (ED^tief-E bzw. ED^tief-S)
• Erstdruck für hohe Stimme Nr. 16–30, Einzelausgaben und Bandausgabe (ED^hoch-E bzw. ED^hoch-S)
• Einzelausgabe Nr. 25 als Zeitschriftenbeigabe (ED-Z)

• Nr. 21 für Männerchor (Opus 83 Nr. 7)
• Nr. 16 und 22 für Singstimme und Orchester: Erstausgaben
• Nr. 16, 18 und 25 für Violine und Klavier (Opus 103c)
• Nr. 22 für einstimmigen Kinderchor und Klavier (Autorschaft unklar)

• Nr. 18 und 21 für gemischten Chor von Henriette Schelle

• Nr. 16 und 22 für Singstimme und Orchester von Richard Sahla
• Nr. 22 für zweistimmigen Kinderchor von Adalbert Lindner
• Nr. 24 für Singstimme und Streichquartett von Richard Sahla