Reger's Historicist Modernism

Abstract

In an article in 19th-Century Music published in 2002, I began to explore what I called modernism in music.1 This concept encompasses works composed in the Austro-German sphere in the years around 1900, which were intended and received as modern, but which derived their compositional energy primarily from techniques of a more remote past. Historicist modernism should be distinguished from neoclassicism, a somewhat later practice that crystallized around 1920. Exemplary neoclassical works, such as those by Stravinsky and Hindemith written in the decades between the world wars, tend to distance the musical past through a cosmopolitan lens. Works of modernism have a more urgent, elemental, and intense connection with the past, as in those of Max Reger that probe his psychic and musical relationships to Bach. We should briefly unpack the components of the term historicist Modernism as a phenomenon has been treated in a vast number of critical and historical writings. Die Modeme, as it was often called in German, refers to a set of beliefs and principles that in the broadest sense were shared by many creative artists in Europe from about the 1850s on. Many commentators point to Baudelaire's conception ofmodem, articulated in 1859, as foundational for this phase of For Baudelaire, (not yet an -ism) connoted not merely the presentness of an era, but rather a special quality ofle transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent that could be found in any period.2 The modem was thus set against not the old, but the eternal. The adjective modern and the substantive die Moderne appear frequently in German writings both from within and about the period 1880 to 1920. The nominal form can have the connotation of either or both of the English words modernity and modernism. In English, however, these words can have different meanings. I tend to understand modernity more as the condition or state of being modern; in this sense, comprises a situation that is almost passive, inevitable. Modernism is a more ideologically charged and voluntary phenomenon. It is in many cases an actual movement, propelled by a group of like-minded thinkers, artists, or critics. But modernism can also suggest a broader tent: in the years around 1900, among composers, critics, and the general public, it could encompass figures as different as Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Max Reger, Hans Pfitzner, Max von Schillings, Alexander Zemlinsky, Ferruccio Busoni, and Gustav Mahler.3