Malinconia
Violoncello Sonatas opp. 5 & 16
As chance and fate would have it, Max Reger (1873-1916) and Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) crossed paths in Munich in 1906 While Andrea de Chirico (1891-1952, later known as Alberto Savinio) received instruction in composition from Reger, his brother Giorgio served as an interpreter or occupied himself with an album of reproductions of paintings by Böcklin. His brief encounter with Böcklin left its atmospheric traces. Nothing conveys a better picture of the melancholy, ethereal loneliness of the composer Max Reger, a man who spent a great deal of his life travelling by train to meet his concert engagements, than do Giorgio de Chirico's railway station paintings. Daily life hurries on at its most merciless pace in the world of timetables and connection s (Reger knew them all!) but in Chirico's paintings all of this is converted, dialectically so, into standstill. Movement coagulates, as it were, into a picture of temporal, empty, eternal duration. Chirico's railway station paintings are adorned with pieces of scenery from the mythically transfigured past; lying somewhere between melancholy and absurdity they evoke diverse moods. Reger's personal creed also involved the conjuring up of "new, undreamed-of emotional moods" in music, and he zealously pursued this goal in his short but musically full life of forty three years.
The turn of the century was a time for the exploration of new artistic and scientific territory, with the publication of Freud's Traumdeutung in 1900 standing as a symbol for the uncovering of the hidden or the forbidden. Reger, a true child of his time and a man who found it difficult to express himself in words, stated in his own way what Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951), his much more eloquent contemporary,would describe as the "inner necessity" of artistic creation.
The cliches about Reger the composer are legion. The Nazis adopted and labelled Reger as a 'German' composer, the effects of which are felt to the present day. Progressive Reger interpreters, above all those belonging to Schönberg's circle and his Society for Private Musical Performances as well as the Busch brothers, were forced to emigrate, and Reger pupils such as Erwin Schulhoff were murdered in concentration camps. Those who or survived, remodelled the psychically labile and alcoholic Reger into the picture of German male health and into a composer of fugues in the style of the old masters. This idea had a formative influence on the interpretation of Reger's oeuvre during the post war years. The hallmark of German nationalistic interpretation of Reger was and often continues to be the reduction of the unprecedented number of markings (tempo, dynamics, and agogics) in his scores to a mediocrity, depriving the works concerned of their expressionistic tension and shrouding them in a uniform gray fog of dynamics and tone colors. Only those interpreters who are committed to the precise reproduction of the complex and individual notation charactertistic as a whole of twentieth-century music help matters here. The traditional disregard and neglect of Reger's early oeuvre from the years beginning in 1890, during his course of studies with Hugo Riemann (1849-1919), stem not least from the composer himself. He later rejected his opp. 1 -25 wholesale. As he wrote to an interested party about his Violoncello Sonata op. 5,
"My first cello sonata op. 5 is nothing at all. It is a terrribly flawed work of my youth!" (letter of August 16, 1901, to Georg Stolz).
Readers who are familiar with Reger's career also know that his vehement lifelong rejection of all his early works was a result of his experiences of those years. He wanted at all costs to avoid having to remember the struggles he went through at the beginning of his career, struggles that would continue to hang over him like a dark cloud or shadow throughout the rest of his life.
It was the crisis of his Wiesbaden years that generated the model for all his further crises. While he spent a total of eight years in Wiesbaden, he later saved himself by moving prematurely in order to avoid sinking into another hopeless situation. He never spent more than three or four years in one place during all the later phases of his career. It was indeed the Wiesbaden crisis that drove Reger to alcoholism during his early years. In order to grasp the full magnitude of this crisis, we have to remember that Joseph Reger had been very reluctant to grant his son permission to study composition. The seventeen-year-old Reger, who began his studies with Riemann in 1890, was pressurised into justify himself, to prove to his extremely mistrustful father that his career choice would not lead him into a dead end. Reger got off to a promising start. Riemann arranged to have his first works with opus numbers published by the Augener Company in London, and some encouraging reviews appeared in music journals in 1893-94, But further recognition was not forthcoming, and depression and drinking were the virtually inevitable outcome. Lacking confidence in sales Augener did not publish Reger's new compositions. The Riemann family could not follow Reger's musical idiom, and all that he heard from his parents' home in Weiden were accusations and complaints about the money they had wasted on his education. He was able to support himself with arrangements, reviews and piano lessons - activities that he loathed because they stood in blatant contradiction to what he felt was his calling. Augener's request that he forget about complicated works on the grand scale and compose short, easy-to-sell piano pieces would set a precedent for almost all his future dealings with publishers.
Reger's sister Emma brought him back home to Weiden in the summer of 1898. His last landlady had evicted him, and he was on the verge of homelessness nervous breakdown. He had hardly composed anything at all for a number of years, although his Violoncello Sonata in F minor op. 5 was composed in the summer of 1892 during his initial Wiesbaden years, when he was still hoping for success and recognition. This sonata, written from the depths of his soul, was the most uncompromising and advanced composition of his whole Wiesbaden period, marking the beginning of a complete turnabout. Neither Riemann nor the dedicatee, the chamber virtuoso Oskar Bruckner (1857-1930) were able to recognize the trail-blazing content of the work. Bruckner was an esteemed cellist and instructor at the Wiesbaden Conservatory. He premiered the sonata together with its composer at the Wiesbaden Tonkunstlerverein on October 17, 1893. For Bruckner and Reger the sonata seemed to be nothing more than Brahms, exaggerated to the extreme. And, in fact,Brahms or his cello sonatas were the model that Riemann had given Reger as an antidote to cure his initial enthusiasm for Wagner. Brahmsian elements are in clear evidence in various quarters: melodic design (as yet not so chromatic), piano parts with sixth/octave chains, duplets against triplet rhythms, continuous minor tone, and varying motivic development. This work of Reger's youth stands out not for these obvious traditional elements but for what seems to be an almost unintentional manifestation of the features that would form his later style: irregular, narrative, endless melodies, a thick, polyphonic compact texture, dynamization of the whole composition with grand-scale intensification structures and crashes followed by sudden pianissimo passages, continuous espressivo guided by meticulous playing instructions, temporal flow of stops and starts brought about by the frequent markings: rit. - a tempo, and, not forgetting the greatest degree of technical difficulty - which alone could have limited the dissemination of this work to this the present day.
Throughout his life Reger strongly insisted that he composed pure not programme music. It can hardly be denied that feelings and thoughts were an important source of inspiration for him, at least in his major works.Adalbert Lindner, his first Weiden teacher, stated that "by the composer's own admission,... the whole work [op. 5] is the vision of a dying man who looks back on a lost life." Although it is speculation to suggest so, it almost seems as if Reger had anticipated his own Wiesbaden development in this work. A catastrophic tone completely pervades the work and seems to press forward so incessantly amid all the constant rhythmic-metrical delays and syncopations. The beginning of the Allegro maestoso ma appassionato first movement and the delayed entry of the piano over against the cello(each instrument with its own theme) immediately points to the major concern in this work: the struggle against chaos. Such a piece could not havetolerated a scherzo. The Adagio con gran affetto second movement already contains a high degree of harmonic complication and chromaticism. The relative loosening up in the Allegro (un poco scherzando) finale suggests some measure of alleviation from the tragic tone, but this turns out to be misleading. In the final measures the work returns to the beginning of the piano theme from the first movement. Here a further feature of Reger's style is already in evidence: his predilection for circular conclusions. Later this would also take the form of allusions and citations from his own works, creating the compostional effect of deja vu. All of this no doubt had to do with the initial threats to his artistic existence during his early years. He had a need for music as a permanent condition, as an uninterrupted continuum in which incessant change is united with the unchanging.
In contrast to the gloomy early sonata, Reger's Violoncello Sonata in A minor op.116 his fourth and last such work, might well serve as an example of the romantic idea of emergence from night to light and from suffering to triumph. Reger composed the sonata during the summer of 1910 and dedicated it to Julius Klengel, his friend and colleague at the Leipzig Conservatory and the most famous cellist of the time. The work was premiered on January 18, 1911, and continued to become a success on Reger's concert tours. It dates to his Leipzig period, to years when he was at height of his public prominence. He had received two honorary doctoral degrees and had been showered with distinctions of all kinds. His acceptance of a conducting post with the celebrated Meiningen Court Orchestra during the following year would also bring him success in that field.
The sonata was preceded by two works of a complicated structure that had caused consternation and misunderstanding among the public and the critics: the Piano Quartet in D minor op. 113 and the Piano Concerto in F minor op. 114. The rejection of these deep, gloomy works of Reger, had been a repeated reaction ever since his Wiesbaden period, and deeply hurt the composer, who longed for recognition. The Violoncello Sonata op. 116 is the first demonstration of something that would characterize Reger's future development after his acceptance of the Meiningen post . He now attempted to offset his almost natural tendency toward dense, polyphonically and ornamentally overloaded texture (giving all ten fingers a full workout) with a reduction to a more economical treatment of harmony and the musical line. The apotheosis of this late style in chamber music would later come in his last complete work, the Clarinet Quintet in A major op. 146. The Violoncello Sonata op. 116 may be said to point ahead to the works of his late period. Late period? Of a thirty-seven-year-old composer? As in his early sonata, a visionary element seems to be operative here, perhaps inspired by the unique qualtiy of the cello, an instrument with an extraordinary range of expressive resources at its disposal and with virtually no competitors when it comes to representing the composer's voice. On New Year's Eve 1910 Reger wrote to the pianist August Stradal of Schönberg's Three Piano Pieces op. 11, works that had appeared during that same year: "l know the three piano pieces by Arnold Schonberg; I cannot follow him there. Whether one can still label such things 'music' I do not know; my brain is really to old for this! ... Oh, it makes one want to become a conservative! I believe that I may claim that the path I set out on in Opp. 113 [Piano Quartet], 114[Piano Concerto], and 116 [Violoncello Sonata] will lead to a goal more so than all the new ways."
The element of resignation very much characteristic of Reger's late work, this in the face of the newest developments of musical modernism, is heralded in these words. Reger's last cello sonata contrasts with his first such work in many respects. Instead of an initial outburst in ffz in both instruments, the cello begins alone with the mottolike theme, a chromatic line with an interval structure offering a model example for the forming of the manifold associations that are a hallmark of Reger's mature style. This style not only mirrors the whole course of compositional history from past centuries but also reflects on Reger's own early oeuvre. In doing so, it avoids obvious citation and thus shines all the more evocatively. The first sonata begins with upbeat (piano) and syncopated (cello) themes. These themes determine the forward drive and breakneck impetus of the work right from its very first measure. In contrast, the cello cantilena in the last sonata begins on the downbeat and in half notes. The choral-like peace expounded here is not a false lead: the first four tones (e-b flat-f-d sharp, mm. 1 -2) may be understood as a spreading out of Reger's favorite motif (b-a-c-h; English: b flat-a-c-b).During the course of the movement this motif is presented in subliminal insertion and once in literal form. The motivic variation technique here is extremely refined and flexible in every respect. It takes its point of departure from this solistic cello beginning, and the following observations serve to illustrate it. The ascending minor sixth followed by two descending half tones (e-c-b-b flat, m. 3) recalls the cello introduction in the Tristan Prelude (a-f-e-d sharp, mm. 1 -2) It is not a mere coincidence that the endless melody of the cello cantilena forms the general themeof the sonata; it lends it the character of a somewhat nostalgic retrospective. There are allusions to Beethoven's Violoncello Sonata in A majorop. 69, a work also assigning an initial solo to the stringed instrument.
Reger removes the veil in the antepenultimate measures of the first movement of the sonata. In the concluding resumption of the beginning Reger modifies the original e-b flat tritone to an e-a fifth, the inversion of the beginning of Beethoven's sonata (a-e). The movement ends in A major, the key of Beethoven's sonata. The allusion to Beethoven'sop. 69 continues in the rhythmical structure of the scherzo. As always, Reger adheres to the classical sonata scheme (Allegro moderate-Presto-Largo-Allegretto con grazia), but with a the fan of twelve-tone complexes and sound planes of indeterminate tonality. All four movements of the sonata develop from and end in a pianissimo.
The journey between the F minor sonata of the nineteen-year-old and the A minor sonata of the thirty-seven-year-old seems to have been both long and short. The last sonata, like the first, concludes by returning to the beginning, not in the form of a literal resumption but with what might be termed a variative sublimation. The descending cello cantilena in the last three measures the ascending line in the three measures introducing the theme: the minor sixth of the A minor (with its Wagernian yearning) has become the major sixth of the concluding A major.
Susanne Shigihara
Translated by Susan Mane Praeder
