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Max Reger
Max Reger
(born in
Brand
,
Bavaria
,
19 March
1873
; died
11 May
1916
) was a
German
composer
,
organist
,
pianist
and teacher.
Reger’s father was a schoolteacher who was an
amateur
musician
. When he was a boy Max helped his father to rebuild an
organ
that was going to be thrown away. This was the instrument on which he learned to play. It was some time before he started proper lessons, but by the time he was a teenager he was playing the organ for church services. When he was 15 he went to
Bayreuth
to hear
Wagner’s
operas. This was the moment when Reger decided he wanted to become a musician.
Reger studied music in
Munich
and
Wiesbaden
with a famous teacher Hugo Riemann. He composed a lot of music, especially for the organ. His musical style was similar to that of
Brahms
, but he also learned a lot from the music of
Bach
,
Mendelssohn
and
Schumann
. He liked the
symphonic poems
of
Liszt
and these gave him the ideas for writing chorale fantasies for the organ, although he never wrote music that tells a story (
programme music
).
In
1902
Reger married. He and his wife
adopted
two children. In
1907
he became professor of
composition
at the University of
Leipzig
. He was a very good teacher. He became well-known abroad. He travelled to London where he spent hours in the
art galleries
. Then he bored his friends by talking all the time about the
paintings
. He conducted the orchestra at
Meiningen
, performing works by many composers, especially Brahms,
Bruckner
and his own.
Reger enjoyed eating and drinking. He regularly went to his local cafe where he would eat ten large
sausages
and drink ten glasses of
beer
. His
health
got bad, and he died of a
heart attack
in Leipzig, where he was visiting friends on his way home from
the Netherlands
.
Reger wrote an enormous amount of music, but very little of it is played nowadays. He wrote in a late-Romantic style. He is best remembered for his organ music. He liked to write
fugues
and sets of
Variations
. His
Fantasy and Fugue on
BACH
is one of the hardest pieces ever written for organ. He wrote a lovely song called
Marias Wiegenlied
(
Mary’s
lullaby
).