Notes for: August 12, 2025
If Max Reger’s light, airy, and totally ingratiating Serenade for Flute, Violin, and Viola in G Major were the only composition of his that you had heard, you’d be hard-pressed to understand why much of his music generated passionate controversy. Reger was a familiar and popular musical presence in turn-of-the-century Germany. His massive output over two decades included more than 1000 compositions in every genre, including 200 pieces for the organ alone. In addition to churning out often mammoth compositions, he kept up a punishing concertizing schedule, giving 150 or more piano and organ concerts a year throughout Europe. Meanwhile he was teaching and acting as director at the Leipzig conservatory and later conducting the Meiningen court orchestra.
Like Brahms, whom he greatly admired, Reger stood at an intersection of musical styles. Ahead lay the lush harmonies and the chromaticism of Wagner, Liszt, and their late Romantic followers, while behind were the Baroque and Classical forms and structures. In his music Reger embraced the new while never abandoning the older formal structures. Traditionalists admired works like his Bach-inspired organ chorales and his Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart. But they blasted other compositions for being too long, harmonically dense, extremely chromatic, and complex. Yet these were exactly the qualities his Modernist supporters admired. Schoenberg, thought Reger was a genius; Hindemith called him “the last giant of music.”
Reger is at his most accessible in the G Major Serenade. The work is a charming example of his skill at embracing both tradition and innovation. Here he is the Classicist who revered Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, while at the same time he deftly blends in Modernist elements. The work opens with an impish Vivace that sounds like a throwback to an earlier era. Almost immediately, though, Reger modulates to another key, a distinctive characteristic of his music. Reger wrote a book on modulation, and you can hear throughout this movement how central the concept was to him. (Later in today’s program you’ll hear how Brahms also used modulation, in the technique that Schoenberg named “developing variation.”)
Throughout the Vivace, Reger moves with ease between two themes, one rhythmically bouncy, the other longer-lined and pensive. After a playful ending, a tender flute melody opens the expressive Larghetto. This is a heartfelt movement in which chromaticism – another characteristic of Reger’s style – plays an important role, adding richness. Then it’s back to friskiness, in a good-humored Presto driven by scampering triplets that are interrupted occasionally by slow, flowing legato passages. Throughout the movement, these passages put brakes on the forward momentum. But the triplets prevail – until the end, when, in a surprise, Reger brings the Serenade to a quiet close.