German gems

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It is hard to embrace Max Reger. For a start, he is surely the physically ugliest of all composers, surpassing even Prokofiev, or Zemlinsky, whose repulsiveness actually inspired an opera libretto. Reger’s slobbish face, plus pince-nez and thick sulky lips, already anticipates the music’s mix of shortsighted with greedy grossness. Still more suggestive, the notorious address to a hostile critic from the throne of his villa’s smallest room — ‘Sir, your notice is before me; in a moment it will be behind me’ —confident arrogance and asinine coarseness memorably conjoined.

E.J. Dent, Italophile and champion of Mozart, would mock the heavy Hunnishness of the German genius via a list of ‘er’ composers — Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, Pfitzner, Schreker — encapsulating a history of length, noisiness, inordinate ambition, means over ends, ending in total decadence. Reger fits in here perfectly. Moreover, there’s something vaguely slick and sickly in the name being palindromic: opposites converge, anal tidiness yet over-facility, the inspissated pedantry yet effortless flow of a composer who could emit a massive and masterly fugue between breakfast sausages and chocolate eclairs at elevenses.