Why does everyone hate Max Reger?

The German composer Max Reger, born 150 years ago next week, is mostly remembered today for countless elephantine fugues and one piece of lavatory humour. When he was savaged by the Munich critic Rudolf Louis, he wrote back to him: ‘Sir, I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me.’ The quip was probably borrowed from Voltaire, but since no one can find it in his writings the credit has gone to Reger.

But let’s not dwell on the image of the morbidly obese composer taking his revenge. What’s interesting is that Reger was hated by so many critics. Then, as now, it was a thought crime for a young man (he died of a heart attack at 43) to make a point of embracing tradition. Reger was probably the most technically accomplished writer of large-scale fugues since Bach; he revelled in his fluency and loved to rub progressive noses in it. He loved to take a musical morsel from the past – a minuet by Telemann, a bagatelle by Beethoven – and examine it from every conceivable angle before feeding it into his giant fugue-machine.

His orchestral Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Hiller is based on a tiny tune by Johann Adam Hiller (1728-1804), the first Kapellmeister of the Leipzig Gewandhaus. In Franz Konwitschny’s recording of the piece with that orchestra,  Hiller’s theme lasts 27 seconds while Reger’s musings on it stretch to 45 minutes.

That sounds gruesome, so I was surprised to read the legendary critic Tully Potter describe the Konwitschny Hiller Variations as ‘one of the great recordings of anything’. Then I listened to it and was beguiled by the richness of Reger’s orchestral flavours and his inexhaustible intellectual energy.