The strong, calm, classic beauty of
Brahms is wanting. For all its air of subtlety and severity and
profundity, its learned and classicizing manner, the music of Reger is
really superficial. The man only seldom achieves form. Generally, for
all the complex and convulsive activity of his music, nothing really
progresses, develops, happens in it. Above all, the stylistic severity
of Brahms in Reger has become a confusion of styles; an absence of
style. The classic has become the baroque.
Reger is one of the men who develop muscles that hamper all grace and
freedom of activity. One cannot help feeling that he went to the classic
masters for their formulas in order to make of composition chiefly a
mental exercise, that he accepted so many rules and manners and turns in
order to free himself of the necessity of making free and full and
spontaneous movements. With Reger, creation becomes routine. His works
are stereotyped; stale terribly quickly. There are moments when one
wonders whether he understood at all what creation is. For certainly,
three-quarters of his compositions seem written out of no inner
necessity, bring no liberation in their train. They are like
mathematical problems and solutions, sheer brain-spun and unlyrical
works. One is ever conscious in Reger that he is solving contrapuntal
problems in order to astonish the vulgar herd of the professors.
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