But some inner might that the elder man lacked
gave the young Genevese composer the courage to speak out, and to attain
salvation. It was, after all, a sort of intelligence, a sense of
reality, a real overwhelming spiritual strength that Mahler lacked. For
all his immense capacities, he was a weak man. He permitted his
environment to ruin him.
Reger
The copies of most of Max Reger's compositions are ornamented with a
cover design representing Beethoven's death-mask wreathed with laurel.
It was in all sincerity that his publishers placed that decoration
there. For there was a moment when Reger excited high hopes. At the time
when he appeared, the cause of "absolute" music seemed lost. Musical
modernity and the programmatic form had come to seem inseparable. The
old classical forms were being supplanted by those of Wagner, Liszt and
Strauss. Not that there was a paucity of bespectacled doctors of music
who felt themselves called to compose "classical" works. But the content
of their work was invariably formal. Reger, however, seemed able to
effect a union between the modern spirit and the forms employed by the
masters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He, the troubled,
nervous, modern man, wrote with fluency fugues and double fugues,
chaconnes and passacaglie, concerti grossi and variations.
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