Reger: Songs

The Bavarian composer Johann Baptist Joseph Maximilian Reger, or Max Reger, is a distinctive voice in late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century German music: a bridge between Brahms and Schoenberg. An ardent Wagnerite, Reger studied music in Wiesbaden and Munich with Hugo Riemann, an influential music theorist and composer who steered his pupil to the Bach, Beethoven and Brahms tradition. But Reger was his own man: ‘I take what is good just as it comes’, he wrote, ‘and I am utterly opposed to every form of musical partisanship.’ In his music one can hear his love of the revolutionary Wagnerian–Lisztian tonal language and of Hugo Wolf’s post-Wagnerian works (Reger dedicated his Op 51 songs to Wolf and edited his posthumous papers), as well as his devotion to Bach-style counterpoint and Brahmsian developing variation. Reger was, of course, famous as an organ composer, and the chorale textures one finds so often in his works are infused with the extended chromatic techniques of a later day. Although he was primarily a composer of instrumental music, he did write almost three-hundred songs, spanning his creative output from the age of seventeen to his final song created the year before his death.

Almost two-thirds of Reger’s lieder date from his time in Munich from 1901 to 1906, when he attempted to find success in Richard Strauss’s city, to little avail; he bitterly described his opponents as the ‘Aktiengesellschaft für angewandte Impotenz’ (the ‘corporation for applied impo­tence’). His riposte to the hostile Munich critic Rudolf Louis is famous: ‘I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment, it will be behind me!’ But he met his beloved Elsa von Bercken in Munich, wrote a treatise on modulation in which he distanced himself from Riemann (who felt betrayed), and achieved some success with the earlier works in the Schlichte Weisen, a set of sixty songs in a more accessible style. He particularly espoused modern poetry, including writers we now consider minor; he wanted poetry that would unlock ‘vistas into what have been virtually undiscovered conditions and conflicts of the mind’ to match his often restless, nervous, nuanced musical strains. In his songs we typically hear shifting inner voices, incessant harmonic fluctuation, frequent changes of dynamics and tempos, and the smudging or blurring of metrical emphases. The result, especially when paired with his tendency to melancholy, is what the composer Wilhelm Killmayer calls ‘the enclosed-within-itself nature of Reger’s music’. For those who can appreciate his innumerable nuances and part-impressionistic, part-expressionistic individual manner, his songs are valuable indeed.

One of the minor writers to whom Reger gravitated was Anna Ritter, a contributor to the weekly journal Die Gartenlaube (‘The Garden Arbour’, the first successful mass-circulation modern magazine). Reger set six of her poems to music as his Op 31, including Mein Traum. A singer who has, we infer, lost much, welcomes dreams as the only faithful things in his life. Reger weaves dream-like magic rhythmi­cally, with two-against-three cross-rhythms and syncopation that create a seamless swaying or hovering motion in the piano, set against the more rhythmically regular vocal melody. The delicate piano dance and doubled counter-melody, to go with the beautiful dreams that dance in pairs, are lovely. In Unbegehrt Ritter compares a beautiful rose that withers away from neglect in the deep forest, with no one to appreciate its beauty and return its ardour, to a soul that suffers the same fate. From transparent, wistful begin­nings in E minor, we hear the intertwining of the singer’s melody and the right-hand part in the piano (a typically Reger-esque trait), with syncopation to hint at the rose’s longing, and a brief flare-up of F sharp major harmonies and a crescendo to depict the soul’s desire.

Flieder is one of Reger’s most arch-Romantic songs, its beginning notably Brahmsian in character. Two lovers walk through the springtime night and kiss to the scent of lilacs. The kiss is the moment of greatest intensity in the song, whose final dying-away cadence is unusual and beautiful. In Ritter’s Volkslied a prophet-bird in the forest sings of love and sorrow to a woman whose lover has left her. The way in which Reger slides between parallel major and minor modes (he conflates the two at the end) is poignant. One remembers Reger’s love of the Lutheran chorale repertory and Bach in particular, with the constantly shifting inner voices. Another ultra-Romantic song is Glückes genug, to words by Baron Detlev von Liliencron, who fought in the Franco-Prussian War and spun verse from his experiences; famous in his day, he influenced Rilke’s much greater body of verse. But this love song in two verses has no trace of anything military; each stanza ends with the title as refrain. Reger often responds to minutiae in the text, so the ‘grievous cares’ that the beloved chases away bring on momentary darkening and a crescendo, while the fortissimo flare-up of passion ‘When I lay on your heart’ is immediately followed by the quietest of endings.

Zwischen zwei Nächten is an energetic self-exhortation from a soldier to relish life, even if a single ray of sun or a short time in the saddle are all one can count as happiness. Reger brews up a massive tempest of militaristic exuberance for the ‘Sword, battle, shrapnel, / Joy, danger, wreath and thorns’ enumerated by the minor poet Gustav Falke’s protagonist. For the lullaby Meinem Kinde, to a text by the same poet, Reger weaves diaphanous textures in the piano at the beginning; in the middle, he builds to a rapturous climax when the singer invokes Love bearing the child to earth from some distant star.

The poetry of Richard Dehmel was hugely popular with fin-de-siècle song composers, including Strauss and Reger. Dehmel was a flower child avant la lettre, notorious for his eroticism, and a radical who declared: ‘The poetry of post coaches is dead; we celebrate its resurrection in the poetry of railroads and machines.’ But composers gravitated to such sweet specimens as his lullabies, including the Wiegenlied in Reger’s Op 43, in which a little bee and a little spider are enjoined to sing a little prince to sleep. Reger’s genius for enchanting lullabies is on display, and this one rocks and sways in classic cradling motion, gently animated by dotted rhythms. The composer touches on one harmonic location after another with consummate lightness.

Any temptation for American consumers of hot dogs to chuckle at the name Oskar Wiener (who was a German-Jewish poet and publisher in Prague) will be stopped in its tracks by this writer’s tragic fate—deportation, and death in April 1944. In Sag es nicht a sweetheart is repeatedly enjoined not to say it (that they spoke in secret, that they kissed, that they met in the forest by night). But lovers can’t resist ‘saying it’ any more than ‘doing it’; here Reger joins a graceful vocal line to an independent scherzo or intermezzo in the piano. One notes that ‘es/it’ is always a semiquaver (sixteenth note) and higher than the pitches that surround it: these are repeated small leaps of delight. At the end, the singer virtually shouts ‘don’t say it’, then repeats the words in comically hushed fashion, with the piano fading away in even softer conspiratorial caution—a little late.

The singer of Wiener’s Am Dorfsee and the weeping willow by the lake are solitary and sorrowful, a state Reger embodies at the start in the gloomiest of doubled, low, rich, parallel triads in unusual progressions; that the piano accompaniment is full of parallel fifths goes without saying. When the wind brings a snatch of merry waltz music to the singer’s ears, we hear its echo in the piano before returning to depths of gloom. The final octave plunge goes to the lowest note on the modern instrument.

Both Strauss and Reger set Dehmel’s Träume, träume, du mein süßes Leben! (Wiegenlied) to music, and both created harp-like, quasi-orchestral sounds in the piano and soaring, ecstatic soprano melodies—but Reger’s harmonic language is not Straussian. That both songs are in D major seems hardly coincidental (Reger’s setting followed a year later than Strauss’s). Julius Sturm, another minor poet notable for piety and patriotism, tells a didactic moral fable in Zwei Gänse. A grey goose invites a white goose for a stroll in the meadow and is haughtily refused to music that is briefly molto pomposo. We encounter Falke’s poetry again in Viola d’amour, in which the poet hymns the Baroque precursor of the modern viola. Reger goes to town with virtuosic pseudo-string melody in the right-hand part.

Of all Dehmel’s poems Waldseligkeit was one of the most popular with composers; Strauss is among those who set it to music. Nature-enchantment happens by night, when the solitary singer feels most himself and closest to his beloved. Reger sounds wide-spanning, arpeggiated chords mostly in the treble and in a hypnotic, even rhythm. The falling triplets in the piano through much of Sehnsucht will remind some of Robert Schumann’s late song Heimliches Verschwinden, although Reger’s asymmetrical seven-bar phrases and late-Romantic harmonies are not at all Schumannesque.

John Henry Mackay was brought to Germany as an infant and remained there the rest of his life; his left-wing, even anarchistic leanings are apparent in many of his poems, but it was Mackay’s blissful vision of union on the ‘sun-breathing earth’ that attracted both Strauss and Reger to Morgen!. Many of us are familiar with Strauss’s gravely rhapsodic hymn to love, but Reger takes a different tack: this is late-Romantic harmony in its most extreme guise, a chromaticism-filled world of shifting, non-resolving chords. The A major of the key signature appears only in the last two bars.

Ludwig Jacobowski, who died aged thirty-two of meningitis, was once famous for his novel Werther, der Jude (‘Werther the Jew’). In the little poem Kindergeschichte, he spins a variation on Heinrich Heine’s Mein Kind, wir waren Kinder, with its children who play at marriage and parenting. In this rustic-jovial scenario, with its sweet-sly inflections on the words ‘bride and bridegroom’, Reger goes back and forth between raucous outbursts and softer strains in close proximity, with the hilarious piano postlude capping off the revelation of thirteen dolls as the couple’s ‘children’. In an entirely different vein, the words of Äolsharfe by the Munich poet Hermann Lingg are an invitation to any composer to create his or her own version of the ancient Aeolian harp, named for Aeolus the wind-god. When the wind blows across strings stretched lengthwise across two bridges, a box, and a sounding board, harmonic frequencies sound in eerie Nature-music. Reger creates an atmospheric tone-poem, with a treble ostinato on the pitches F and D flat as the wind-harp.

Hat gesagt—bleibt’s nicht dabei (from Des Knaben Wunderhorn) is another masterful example of the naïveté and sophistication that join forces in Reger’s comic works. The text is a folk poem also set by Strauss: a strong-minded village maiden’s parents attempt to bribe her to do chores with the promise of three enticements (three eggs for rocking a cradle, three roast birds for spying on the maids), but only her sweetheart’s promise of three kisses sounds appealing. She knows that he won’t short-change her. Reger’s setting begins in folksong-like manner—we even hear horn-call figures—but becomes rapidly unfolk-like. The music goes into ‘dreamy mode’ when the singer says that her sweetheart has told her to think of him and then becomes ever more animated en route to the end, as she shucks off domestic duties for love.

The sixty small songs in Reger’s Schlichte Weisen were composed between 1903 and 1912 and give us Reger’s characteristic stylistic elements in a more easily digestible package: he wrote them to refute the charge that his songs were impossible to perform and impossible to sell. He maintained friendly relations with Richard Strauss (he first met him in 1896) and Hans Pfitzner, despite the differences between their aesthetics and his own, evident in the next two songs. Du meines Herzens Krönelein, to a lyric poem by Felix Dahn (a historian whose writings would later bolster Nazism), praises the shy and modest sweetheart over bold, lying flirts. Notice in Reger’s first phrase his slight but telling offbeat and durational emphasis on ‘meines’ (‘my heart’s coronet’) and the harmonic shifts that invest ‘coronet’ and ‘You are like the rose in the forest’ with their own special beauty. Waldeinsamkeit, which sets a Franconian folk poem, was the earliest of the Simple melodies to be com­posed and comes closest to the folksong ideal, with its four-bar phrases and mild chromaticism (although one notes the ceaseless motion in the accompaniment as a typical Regerian trait).

In Wenn die Linde blüht, Karl Busse, who belonged to a circle of poets supported by a chocolate magnate in Cologne, created another in a long line of German poems linking linden trees and young lovers. Here, the time of linden blossoms is also that of baby geese, tended by a goose-girl who neglects her charges when her lover arrives and begins to kiss her—but she fears what the farmer might say should his birds go missing. In this charming song, Reger traffics in harmonious third doublings of the winsome melody, lilting folksong-like rhythms, and gently swaying figures to paint a darling genre scene. For the publisher-poet Ernst Ludwig Schellenberg’s sweetly sentimental poem Glück, the beloved’s quiet, modest glance impels both happiness and nostalgic melodies filling the air. Reger rings bell chimes throughout the song; at first, they sink quietly into the low bass, and then at mid-song treble chimes sound, their delicacy captivating.

For the plangent love song In einem Rosengärtelein Reger went to a musical source: the 1633 Amores musicales oder newe gantz lustige Amorosische Liedlein of Daniel Friderici, music-master in Rostock until his death from plague. In the ages-old botanical symbols of love, the singer spots a wonderfully beautiful little rose beside a tree in a rose garden and declares that he would very gently enshrine it in his heart. Reger sets the poem in an antique chorale or folk-like manner, but with asymmetrical phrases, typically Reger-esque shifts of chord colour and mode, and sudden dissonance where you might not expect it. The dramatic shift at the exclamation ‘Ach Gott’ (‘Ah God’) is especially striking.

Reger, who was the father of two, loved lullabies and wrote some of the finest late-Romantic specimens of the genre, including Des Kindes Gebet. What makes this song magical are the ethereal swaying figures in the high treble and the celestial bell chimes below, also in the treble; even as the poem tells of a child’s words being carried through Heaven’s gates to God, we hear celestial music. The sudden hush and the removal to a distant key as the angels listen closely is another of Reger’s ethereal shifts to another, and enchanted, place.

Die Mutter spricht belongs to the ages-old poetic genre of mothers giving advice to their daughters about men—in this case, to stay away from them. Reger quotes ironically from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream wedding music and appends a footnote: ‘Hunters of reminiscence motifs and similar mongers are reassured that this “quotation” is thoroughly intentional.’ The embittered mother goes back and forth between gentler versions of the main musical idea, as if not wanting to frighten her daughter too much, and highly chromatic and acerbic ones, ending with an unharmonized, blunt injunction: ‘Stay single!’

Over gently swaying open fifths in the bass, a little cloud drifts gently downward in the treble throughout almost every bar of Das Wölklein; the textures in the piano are enchanting. When the singer hymns the little cloud’s golden glow, we hear a rising chromatic figure in the piano as the dynamics swell from soft to ‘almost loud’. A similar state of near-mystical bliss in Nature fills Mittag, whose singer lies dreamily in a field of ripe corn and again watches the clouds go by. Reger’s gently swaying melody at the start is lyricism incarnate. At the culmination of the song, ‘great longing’ takes flight to a brief crescendo that dies back down to dreaminess at the end.

The mother in Die Mutter spricht is almost certainly warning her daughter against merry rascals like the one found in Schelmenliedchen, who sneaks out of his room for an all-night rendezvous en plein air with his sweetheart. Once again, Reger excels at quasi-naïve (but not really) humour and a delightfully independent piano part, filled with leaps of joy and yodelling inflections; the turn to the Neapolitan key when the singer repeats ‘Then we cuddle and kiss’ is among the many darling details of this song.

Perhaps Reger’s single most famous song is the Mariä Wiegenlied, which might seem ‘simple’ at first glance, but really isn’t: the seemingly effortless shifts of tonal place (from F major to D major to A minor in the first three phrases) and of metre required consummate artistry to create. As Mary bids the child lay its weary head upon her breast, Reger shifts to a darker, warmer, richer harmonic fabric for just two bars.

Charms to catch a mouse are part and parcel of German children’s songs and folklore (Reger would have known Wolf’s charming setting of Eduard Mörike’s Mausfallensprüchlein). The incessant staccato activity throughout Mausefangen, the drawn-out musical charac­terization of the long mouse tail, the sudden harmonic jolt as the mouse runs away with its tail intact: it is all delightful. Our performers’ final lullaby from this set, Zum Schlafen, lulls its listeners into enchanted sleep in very Romantic-folk-like fashion, with minimal incursions of Reger’s signa­ture unexpected harmonies, dissonances and harmonic disjunctions. For the second verse, with its lovely treble echoes in the piano, little Grete is promised golden dreams after hearing the golden bird sing in the pear tree. Of all the Schlichte Weisen, this is among the simplest and most moving.

We end with a Christmas song: Ehre sei Gott in der Höhe!, for either piano, harmonium or organ. This is an embellished chorale setting, with bells chiming at the start, but the familiar, sturdy march of hymn-like chords is offset by Reger’s distinctive, complex and highly chromatic harmonic language.

Susan Youens © 2016