of "Salome," is nearer the spirit of Bach than Reger
with all his fugues and double fugues ever got.

No doubt, Reger loved the mathematical solidity and balance of the older
music, and therefore sought to assimilate it. But he did more than just
learn of it, as Brahms had done. He sought to rival the great men of
the past on their own ground, to do what they did better than they had
done it, to be able to say, "See, I can do the trick, too!" So we find
him writing counterpoint for the sake of the learnedness and presumable
respectability, rather than as a piece of expression. His compositions
are overburdened and cluttered and marred by all sorts of erudite turns
and twists and manoeuvers. The man's entire attention seems to have
been set on making his works astonish the learned and make mad the
simple. Even a slight song like "Wenn die Linde blueht" is decked with
contrapuntal felicities. He copies the mannerisms of the composers of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, contorts his compositions with
all manner of outmoded turns. He appears to have come to his worktable
inevitably with his mind full of the compositions he had been studying.
His impulse seems always a reflected thing, a desire to compete with
some one on that person's terms. He writes fugues for organs and sonatas
for violin solo under the influence of Bach, concerti grossi under the
influence of Haendel, variations under that of Mozart, sonatas under
that of Brahms. In vain one searches for a perfectly individual style
throughout his works. The living man is buried under the mass of badly
assimilated learning. Even at best, in the Hiller variations, in some of
the string trios and organ fugues, some of his grave adagios, even in
some of his sardonic and turbulent scherzi (perhaps his most original
contributions), his art is rather more a refinement on another art than
a fresh and vital expression. In him, education had produced the typical
pedant, a pedant of Cyclopean muscularity, perhaps, but nevertheless a
pedant.

And so, instead of being Brahms's successor, Reger is to-day seen as the
very contrary of Brahms. It is not that fugues and concerti in the olden
style cannot be written to-day, that modern music and the antique forms
are incompatible. It is that Reger was very little the artist. He
mistook the material vesture for the spirit, thought that there were
formulas for composition, royal roads to the heaven of Bach and Mozart.
Something m