the courage to speak out, and to attain
salvation. It was, after all, a sort of intelligence, a sense of
reality, a real overwhelming spiritual strength that Mahler lacked. For
all his immense capacities, he was a weak man. He permitted his
environment to ruin him.

Reger

The copies of most of Max Reger's compositions are ornamented with a
cover design representing Beethoven's death-mask wreathed with laurel.
It was in all sincerity that his publishers placed that decoration
there. For there was a moment when Reger excited high hopes. At the time
when he appeared, the cause of "absolute" music seemed lost. Musical
modernity and the programmatic form had come to seem inseparable. The
old classical forms were being supplanted by those of Wagner, Liszt and
Strauss. Not that there was a paucity of bespectacled doctors of music
who felt themselves called to compose "classical" works. But the content
of their work was invariably formal. Reger, however, seemed able to
effect a union between the modern spirit and the forms employed by the
masters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He, the troubled,
nervous, modern man, wrote with fluency fugues and double fugues,
chaconnes and passacaglie, concerti grossi and variations. He seemed to
have mastered the secrets of the old composers, to be continuing their
work, developing their thought and style. He excelled in the control of
what appeared to be the technicalities of composition. Had he not, in
his "Contributions to the Theory of Harmony," proposed one hundred
examples of cadences modulating from the common chord of C-major through
every possible key and transpository sequence? Had he not written two
books of canons displaying the most amazing technical ingenuities; found
it simple, as in his "Sinfonietta," to keep five or six strands of
counterpoint going? And so, believing that he was about to do for the
music of the post-Wagnerian period what Brahms had done for that of the
romantic period, the musical conservatives and traditionalists rallied
to him. He was acclaimed by a large public lineal successor of the three
great "B's" of music. Quite in the manner that they had once opposed
Brahms to the composer of "Parsifal," the partisans of musical
absolutism elevated Reger as a sort of anti-pope to Richard Strauss.
Whole numbers of musical reviews were devoted to the study and
discussion of his art in all its ramifications. Reger seemed on the
verge of gainin