Max Reger: Works for Organ

At the end of the 19th century, Max Reger experienced a great personal crisis that he was only able to overcome through music. The results are the two great Chorale Fantasias, op. 40, based on the Protestant chorales How lovely shines the Morning Star and Smite me notin your anger. For these works Reger could employ all forms of compositional freedom without having to compete with “giants” such as Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, whom he esteemed. Reger became famous through his Twelve Organ Pieces, op.59, whose sensitively developed melodies echo Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s Songs Without Words. As the focal point of his organ oeuvre, both the Chorale Fantasias and the Twelve Organ Pieces are a testament to the virtuosity and compositional diversity of Max Reger, which Ulfert Smidt, organist at the Marktkirche in Hannover, performs with perfection on the stunning Goll organ, thereby spanning an arc between early and contemporary music. Or, as Max Reger would put it: “I, the most fervent admirer of Johann Sebastian Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, am supposed to preach of the revolution! What I merely wish is a development of this style.”