don, one is perforce reminded of the photograph of Reger
which his publishers place on the cover of their catalogue of his works,
the photograph that shows something that is like a swollen, myopic
beetle with thick lips and sullen expression crouching on an
organ-bench. There is something repulsive as well as pedantic in this
art. The poetry, the nobility, the moderation and cleanness of line of
Brahms is absent. Instead, there is a sort of brutal coldness, the
coldness of the born pedant, a prevalence of bad humor, a poverty of
invention and organizing power that conceals itself under an elaborate
and complex and erudite surface. The strong, calm, classic beauty of
Brahms is wanting. For all its air of subtlety and severity and
profundity, its learned and classicizing manner, the music of Reger is
really superficial. The man only seldom achieves form. Generally, for
all the complex and convulsive activity of his music, nothing really
progresses, develops, happens in it. Above all, the stylistic severity
of Brahms in Reger has become a confusion of styles; an absence of
style. The classic has become the baroque.

Reger is one of the men who develop muscles that hamper all grace and
freedom of activity. One cannot help feeling that he went to the classic
masters for their formulas in order to make of composition chiefly a
mental exercise, that he accepted so many rules and manners and turns in
order to free himself of the necessity of making free and full and
spontaneous movements. With Reger, creation becomes routine. His works
are stereotyped; stale terribly quickly. There are moments when one
wonders whether he understood at all what creation is. For certainly,
three-quarters of his compositions seem written out of no inner
necessity, bring no liberation in their train. They are like
mathematical problems and solutions, sheer brain-spun and unlyrical
works. One is ever conscious in Reger that he is solving contrapuntal
problems in order to astonish the vulgar herd of the professors. Reger
certainly knew the art of talking with an astonishing show of logic, and
yet saying nothing. Perhaps he talked continuously in order not to have
to reflect. And for all his erudition, he understood his masters
intellectually only. He felt himself called upon to continue the work of
the three great "B's," and yet never understood the grand spirit that
animated their art. Strauss, with his fine conduct of instruments
through the score