Reger as arranger (RWA vol. III/1-11)
Stefan König
1.
Max Reger’s arrangements of works by other composers comprise a major portion of his oeuvre, with current research counting no less than 290 such works in total. There are arrangements for piano solo or duet (128), for organ (46) or harmonium (8), for solo voice(s) and orchestra (38), for orchestra (6), for chamber ensembles (40), for men’s chorus (18) and for mixed chorus (6). Reger’s source material spans a broad swathe of music history, ranging from madrigals of the Renaissance and early Baroque to works by his contemporaries such as Hugo Wolf and Richard Strauss. But the core focus of his activity as an arranger was Johann Sebastian Bach, with 87 arrangements. Bach was Reger’s guiding star and a repeated source of inspiration in his own compositions.1 Reger also engaged in an intensive intertextual dialogue with works by Hugo Wolf (38 arrangements) – a composer with whom he himself identified – and by Johannes Brahms (44), the man to whom Reger was often regarded as the musical successor. They are followed – at some distance – by arrangements of Franz Schubert (23), Richard Strauss (13), Frédéric Chopin (11), Robert Schumann (9) and Richard Wagner (5).2
The third series of the Reger-Werkausgabe (RWA) is devoted to this body of work, one that was excluded from the Max Reger Complete Edition (1954–1986). The identifiers for these works that were assigned by the Reger-Werkverzeichnis (RWV) are retained here. They comprise the ordering letter B (for “Bearbeitung”, “arrangement”), and an alphabetical listing according to the composer of the original work and its chronology in Reger’s œuvre (e.g. Bach-B5).3 The editorial plan of the RWA does not include three larger-scale reworkings that were commissioned from Reger for the composers in question during or shortly after his studies in Wiesbaden: the orchestration of Kurt von Beckerath’s cantata Kassandra, based on the composer’s short score (1897), the additional orchestration necessary for Albert Fuch’s melodrama La spiga rossa (1896) and the vocal score of the opera Ingo (1894/95) by Philipp Rüfer. We also decided against including an edition of Franz Paul Lachner’s Overture to the Cantata “Die vier Menschenalter” op. 31 (“The four ages of man”, version for small orchestra by H. Kirchner), since Reger in this case merely added to the original arranger’s work by providing the brass parts (between 1898 and 1901). Reger’s revision of August Klughardt’s Andante and Toccata op. 91 was a special case (Klughardt-H1) that was commissioned by the publishing company Hug & Co. when its composer died at the age of 54 in 1902, shortly before completing the work. His heirs submitted the work to his publisher, who thereupon commissioned Reger to complete it.4 The RWA also omits Reger’s editions and practical arrangements of works by Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel and Hugo Wolf.5 Arrangements that have survived only in fragmentary state will be edited and placed either in an appendix or, in some cases, only online.6
Reger stood alongside Ferruccio Busoni as one of the most prolific arrangers of the period around 1900, and his activity in this field is characteristic of this “age of transcription”.7 Arrangements of Bach were so popular with the piano virtuosos of the day (especially arrangements penned by those same virtuosos) that the original compositions themselves rather faded into the background.8 For Reger, too, one of his prime reasons for arranging music for another instrument was to expand the repertoire, both for concert performance and for the domestic scene. The latter category, for example, included piano reductions of orchestral works (see Brahms-B4), while the former included arrangements of organ works for the piano and vice versa. There was as yet little understanding of historical performance practice. Original instruments were in any case often not available (or available no more), so playing these works on modern instruments was the only means of actually hearing the music of previous centuries. Editions of this music were accordingly also adapted to the tastes of the day and kitted out with dynamic, expression and articulation markings, most of which had not featured in the original compositions. In particular, the piano transcriptions of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in a minor BWV 543 by Franz Liszt and of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in d minor BWV 565 by Liszt’s pupil Carl Tausig (1841–1871) were extremely popular in the concert programmes of the time.9 In his younger days as a pianist, Reger also occasionally included Tausig’s arrangement in his repertoire.
Arrangements were also much in demand on the music market, as the 19-year-old Reger had been aware when offering his publisher George Augener in London his first such work in August 1892, namely a piano solo arrangement of Franz Schubert’s Symphony in b minor (though the offer was not taken up).10 When Augener asked him three years later to add further Bach arrangements for piano solo to the two he had already published (Bach-B1 and Bach-B2), Reger was delighted: “Of course I’ll be very happy to do it; because I really love doing such work, and besides, Augener pays well for it (3 marks 50 for each printed page)”. (Letter to the critic Arthur Smolian of 13 November 1895) In 1897, Richard Strauss expressly recommended Reger as an arranger to his publishers Otto and Eugen Spitzweg (Verlag Jos. Aibl) in Munich.11 Reger made many of his arrangements for specific publishers, either because they commissioned them or because he had himself proposed making them. And yet he did not see this activity as mere bread-and-butter work. He continued making arrangements throughout his composing career, even when he was no longer dependent on the financial benefits they offered. His final arrangements date from 1915 and were only published posthumously.
Reger’s work as an arranger afforded him phases of productive recreation in the midst of his everyday life of concert commitments and teaching activities. For him, making arrangements was a relaxing counterbalance to his “strenuous work – namely composing”.12 When Reger was in a sanatorium in Merano in the spring of 1914, recovering from a recent breakdown, he wrote: “I’m living here completely in line with my spa treatment and am only allowed to work very little – I’m just doing a bit of ‘arranging’. I’m still not allowed to compose”. (Letter to Robert Bignell of 30 April 1914) When he adapted a work for a different instrument or instruments, Reger was able to concentrate on the necessary technical procedures in which he was fluent,13 though he also found “the creative reproduction of other people’s works […] to be similar to when a painter copies the old Masters – it’s a means of appropriating and even incorporating the compositional technique and stylistic characteristics of your predecessors”.14 It enabled him to hone his own creative profile and to acquire greater clarity about his own composing. Engaging with the works of others provided him with inspiration in his own music, and we can also often observe creative interactions between Reger’s own compositions and the arrangements that he was making at roughly the same time.15
The external circumstances that had originally prompted Reger’s arrangements shifted over the years, as did the target public for which they were written. At the outset of his career, Reger was particularly interested in virtuoso piano works that he could also play in his own concerts. He still performed as a soloist during his years in Wiesbaden – thus in concerts in February and March 1893, for example, he each time included his piano arrangement of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D major BWV 532 (Bach-B1 no. 3). After becoming friends with Ferruccio Busoni in 1895, he also asked him to include in his programmes “one or other of my two arrangements [Bach-B1 nos. 1 and 2] on occasion in the next season”. (Letter of 23 July 1895) By contrast, his arrangements for piano duet – such as Bach’s Selected Organ Works (Bach-B2), the Brandenburg Concertos (Bach-B9) or his Selected Pieces from Operas by Richard Wagner (Wagner-B2) – were mostly oriented towards the needs of the domestic music-making that played a major role around 1900.
One important source of motivation for Reger was his desire to increase the popularity of works by composers whom he revered by arranging them. At times, he also pursued pedagogical goals. For example, Reger regarded Bach’s chorale preludes as the “essence” of that composer’s art, though at the time they were known only to organists. So by arranging them for piano, he wanted to make them suitable for use in piano lessons (Selected Chorale Preludes, Bach-B4) and thereby also make them accessible for the general purpose of “educating the public’s taste”.16 Together with his friend Karl Straube, Reger also realised a Schule des Triospiels (the “Art of Trio Playing”, Bach-B8), which comprised arrangements of Bach’s Two-Part Inventions for the organ with the addition of a third part. Reger regarded this work as a necessary “contrapuntal exercise”. (Letter to Theodor Kroyer of 22 March 1903)
For Reger, his concert activities and his editing practices always went hand in hand. “Many an idiosyncratic interpretation by Reger the performer is reflected in his printed editions; and conversely, performing Bach in a good 200 concerts – as a conductor and as a pianist – surely constituted a lifelong ‘arranging’ practice on his part”.17 Reger’s concert version of the Entr’acte and Ballet Music from Schubert’s Rosamunde (Schubert-B5), to which he added a new ending, was published in autumn 1915, and documents a manner of interpreting this work that Reger had developed during his three years with the Meiningen Court Orchestra. His experiences as a conductor also resulted in his orchestrating selected songs by Franz Schubert (Schubert-B2 and B3), Johannes Brahms (Brahms-B2 and B3), Edvard Grieg (Grieg-B1) and Robert Schumann (Schumann-B4) between 1913 and 1915.18 Reger was dissatisfied with the tonal imbalance inherent in the mixed concert programmes that were still common in his time, where orchestral works would alternate with blocks of songs with piano accompaniment: “To my ears, it’s often a direct insult to have to hear an orchestral number in a huge hall followed by a lady singer, singing songs to the accompaniment of a piano that always sounds ‘as thin as a rake’ in such a huge hall!”. (Letter to the publisher N. Simrock of 22 November 1914) He aimed to remedy this state of affairs by turning songs with piano into songs with orchestra.19
In contrast to Ferruccio Busoni, Reger did not leave us any writings on the aesthetics of arranging.20 However, apart from the works themselves, numerous letters by Reger offer us indications of his views on the topic, though such comments are unsystematic. In keeping with the conventions of his time, he also failed to provide terminological clarity when giving titles to his arrangements. His title pages usually designate the instrument or instruments intended, with the wording “arranged for …”, though sometimes he writes “transcribed for …” without any perceivable difference in intent; his orchestral arrangements of songs are merely labelled “orchestrated by …”. The phrase “transcribed for pianoforte duet” (in English), which only appears in his arrangements Bach-B2, was probably required by his London publisher Augener.21 Reger himself only used the actual word “Arrangement” for his piano solo version of Franz Schubert’s Divertissement à la hongroise (Schubert-B1), though the term also occurs informally in his letters.22 In the RWA, these various terms are standardised in German throughout as “bearbeitet für …”, in English as “arranged for …”.
Reger did not regard the music of earlier composers as mere historical documents, but wanted instead to reinterpret them and update them from a modern perspective.23 His arrangements comprise a productive transformation of the originals, rethinking them in modern musical terms. This attitude is most obvious in Reger’s numerous arrangements of J.S. Bach in which he rejected academic research into Bach and the “traditional way of playing Bach” by instead “utilising all the interpretative parameters of his time”.24
In Reger’s organ arrangements of Bach’s works, his interpretation of the music also resulted, for example, in contrast effects of an orchestral nature such as can be achieved by changing manual frequently on an organ,25 and by his rejection of historicising elements. Reger preferred the full sonorities of the modern concert grand piano to the harpsichord,26 and it was on the concert grand that he cultivated his “oppositional style of playing Bach”,27 in which he collaborated from 1908 onwards with Philipp Wolfrum.
Reger remained largely faithful to the existing musical text in his arrangements. Depending on the manner of arrangement that he undertook, he might nevertheless expand on the text on any or all levels or reduce its textures (as he did in his vocal scores and piano reductions). But he rarely changed notes, let alone longer passages. Altered pitches in his arrangements are rarely the work of Reger himself but derive from specific readings in his models. Identifying and documenting these sources – in other words, the prints on which Reger based his arrangements – is therefore of crucial importance to the RWA. We find more instances of him expanding on the musical text in his early arrangements, such as in those he made with a concert performance in mind. In the case of the Allegro burlesco from Friedrich Kuhlau’s Piano Sonatina in a minor op. 88 no. 3, for example, Reger’s arrangement (Kuhlau-B1; 1895) “turns a harmless piano piece for lovers of domestic music into an encore piece for concert pianists”.28 As a rule, it was mostly works (and passages in works) with less dense textures that inspired Reger to “make their compositional core more polyphonic”29 (see Chopin-B1, Liszt-B1, Corelli-B1).
In arrangements of older music, Reger’s intention was to bring these works up to date, so his focus was on adding dynamics, slurs and other performance indications that were either absent or barely present in the original. For example, in a letter to the publisher Henri Hinrichsen (C.F. Peters) about his piano duet arrangement of Bach’s First Brandenburg Concerto (Bach-B9 no. 1), Reger wrote: “[…] it will be highly playable! The original score is almost wholly lacking in performance markings, so I shall add them in order to bring these arrangements closer in line with our “modern” feeling for dynamics! (– though this word [modern] is hideous, as is its meaning –)”. (Letter of 8 September 1904)
This “modern” physiognomy of Reger’s arrangements often included differentiated phrasing, an aspect in which his works of the 1890s were still influenced by his teacher Hugo Riemann’s specific conception of it (see Bach-B1, Kuhlau-B1, Schubert-B1).30 When Reger began to take domestic music-making practices31 into consideration after 1900, this brought about a fundamental aesthetic change on his part, as he turned away from the “viscosity”32 that had still characterised his early arrangements for concert performance. He repeatedly expressed his intention to keep his music “as ‘transparent’ as possible” (Letter to Henri Hinrichsen of 4 October 1904) and placed his focus on easy playability and accessibility. In advance of his Brahms orchestrations (Brahms-B2; 1914/15), Reger the experienced orchestral conductor formulated the goal that also applied to his orchestral versions of songs by Schubert, Schumann, Wolf and Grieg: “The orchestration ought to be as subtle and playable as possible, and above all in keeping with the style – after all, it’s Brahms we’re dealing with – the orchestration will be such that everyone – even the smallest orchestra – will have this instrumentation available”. (Letter to Verlag N. Simrock of 19 December 1913)
About this Blogpost
Authors:
Stefan König
Translations:
Chris Walton (en)
Date:
25th April 2025
Tags:
Module III
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Citation
Stefan König: Reger as arranger (RWA vol. III/1-11), in: Reger-Werkausgabe, www.reger-werkausgabe.de/rwa_post_00063, version 4.0, 18th December 2025.
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