Reger and … (RWA vol. III/1)
Christopher Grafschmidt
1.
There were numerous reasons why Reger felt motivated to arrange other composers’ works for organ. Johann Sebastian Bach was in any case a constant presence in his everyday musical life and in how he thought about music, especially since he saw himself and all other composers merely as Bach’s “epigones”. (Letter from Reger to Adalbert Lindner of 6 April 1894) In his opinion, if one hoped to create “truly substantial works of art”, then it was essential to understand “the craft of composition as thoroughly as possible”. (Letter from Reger to Alexander Wilhelm Gottschalg of 3 December 1899) The quickest way to achieve this, he said, was “through studying Bach in as in-depth a manner as possible”. Reger’s many arrangements of Bach’s works1 can be understood as an expression of the conviction he once uttered, namely that “especially with the new generation that’s coming up, we should refer them, always and for ever, to the fountainhead of musical creativity and of the most divine art: Joh. Seb. Bach. And we must show them first and foremost just what J.S. Bach really constitutes”. (Letter from Reger to Ferruccio Busoni of 11 May 1895)
An essential aspect of Reger’s Bach arrangements is undoubtedly his “red ink layer” of performance instructions, with which he endeavours to adapt the work in question to the listening customs of his time. But this is absent from his arrangements of preludes and fugues from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (Bach-B3), whose musical text has also survived only in fragmentary form. As a rule, the lower part is transferred from the second stave to the organ pedals; this is also his practice in his Selected Piano Works, Bach-B6, and the Schule des Triospiels (Bach-B8). As a result, Reger finds himself more or less compelled to fill up the empty stave, such as at the beginning of the Prelude in G major BWV 860. We can observe the same procedure in nos. 8, 9 and 10 of the Selected Piano Works, and it is elevated to a principle in the Schule des Triospiels, where Reger’s most prominent intervention on the “black ink” level consists of the addition of a middle voice throughout, his intention being to “ensure the absolute independence of both hands, both from each other and from the pedal”.2 For Reger, this was an “‘exercise in counterpoint’ – for you always have to keep doing such exercises”. (Letter from Reger to Theodor Kroyer of 22 March 1903)
Occasional major divergences from the original can be explained to a large extent by Reger’s (probable) source, and such divergences can thus also help us to identify it. Most of his somewhat marginal changes, even those that continue for longer passages (e.g. octave transpositions), inevitably concern the pedal part that has to adopt the music of the left hand of the original, despite the smaller range and technical limitations of the pedals.
Reger also made his arrangement of Franz Liszt’s piano piece Legend “St. Francis of Paola walking upon the waves” (Liszt-B1) on his own initiative. Apart from the case of his Schule des Triospiels, which was didactic in intent, it was probably in this piece that Reger made the most additions of his own to the musical text.
We can only surmise Reger’s motives for arranging works for harmonium (his Harmonium-Sammlung-B1, Selected pieces by classical and modern masters). But his reasons were surely private in nature, and he did not intend to publish them. In five of these eight pieces, Reger confines himself to pleasant, technically undemanding sections that were presumably intended for performance in a domestic context on evenings or on Sundays.
Reger’s arrangements of Richard Strauss and Christian Sinding, in contrast, were the result of commissions, though Reger’s own opinion of the two pieces in question was very different in each case. The only work in the present volume in which he endeavoured to remain as close as possible to the original musical text, regardless of the necessity of adapting it to a different instrument, is Sinding’s Andante (Sinding-B1), which seemed to him to be “very well suited for arrangement for the organ”. (Letter from Reger to the publisher Wilhelm Hansen of 1 May 1912) The only conspicuous divergence is from measures 109 to 114, where Reger gave the piano’s upper line a more melodic profile. But he had a very low opinion of Strauss’s Feierlicher Einzug (Strauss-B2), pointing out certain passages that in his opinion ought to have prevented the work from being published at all. He attempted more or less to “save” the piece by occasionally adding extra parts.
About this Blogpost
Authors:
Christopher Grafschmidt
Translations:
Chris Walton (en)
Date:
14th March 2025
Tags:
Module IIIVol. III/1
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Citation
Christopher Grafschmidt: Reger and … (RWA vol. III/1), in: Reger-Werkausgabe, www.reger-werkausgabe.de/rwa_post_00059, version 4.0, 18th December 2025.
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