g a place among the immortals. And his publishers placed
on the covers of his compositions the design that symbolized the great
things they thought the man achieving, and the high heavens for which
they believed him bound.

The success was momentary only. Long before he died, the world had found
in Max Reger its musical _bete noire_. Closer acquaintance with his art
had not ingratiated him with his public. Indeed, concert-audiences had
become bored to the point of exasperation with his classicizing
compositions. To most folk, it appeared as though the man saw no other
end in composition than the attainment of the opus-number One Thousand.
And although his works are rife with the sort of technical problems and
solutions which those initiated into musical science are supposed to
relish, few musicians found them really attractive. Reger made various
attempts to regain the favor he had lost. They were unavailing. Even
when he turned his back on the absolutists and wrote programmatic music,
romantic suites that begin with Debussy-like low flutes and end with
trumpet blasts that recall the sunrise music of "Also Sprach
Zarathustra," ballet suites that seek to rival the "Carnaval" of
Schumann and the waltzes in "Der Rosenkavalier," "Boecklin" suites that
pretend to translate into tone some of the Swiss painter's canvases, he
only intensified the general ill-will. People who knew him whisper that
he realized his failure, and in consequence took to emptying the vats of
beer that finally drowned him. And on the occasion of his death,
valediction went no further than frigidly applauding his creditable work
for the organ, his erudition and productivity that almost rival those of
the eighteenth-century composers. The final attempt to interest the
public in his work, made during the succeeding season, brought but few
people to repent of their former indifference. A revival of interest is
scarcely to be expected.

For it was not a Brahms the world had gotten again. Indeed, it was a
personality of just the sort that Brahms was not. The resemblance was of
the most superficial. Both men went to school to Bach and the polyphonic
masters. Both were traditionalists. There the kinship ends. For the one
was a poet, a sturdily living, rich and powerful person. The other was
essentially a harsh and ugly being, eminently wanting the divine flame.
For Brahms, erudition was only a means to his end, a fortification of
his personal mode of expressi