Antonin Dvorak grew a beard. At least, I assume that he grew it, though perhaps he was born with it. At any rate, my point is that he shouldn't have. At least not that kind of a beard. It made him look perfectly awful. And such a nice man, too! You'd think someone would've told him. But then he was a friend of Brahms, and Brahms had an ever-so-much bigger and woolier beard, so maybe that wouldn't have been a good idea.
On the other hand Max Reger did not grow a beard, and that was probably a pity. For without a beard--to judge from the portrait that appears with clocklike regularity on MHS jackets--he made Dvorak look like the Mona Lisa. (Marcel Duchamp once painted a mustache on the Mona Lisa, but no beard; come to think of t, it was an improvement.) Maybe he should have gone easier on the sauce, of which he was rather fond, and which perhaps hastened his death from what one source describes as "paralysis of the heart" at forty-three. Maybe his looks were an outward reflection of his notorious rudeness-though considering the way the critics mauled him, perhaps you can't blame him. (But then, at times, I can't blame the critics!) Anyhow, I think a beard would have been an improvement-- a long one, such as Der Inspector in The Katzenjammer Kids used to wear. Look--perhaps we might each acquire a Magic Marker and try adding beards to the Reger portraits on the MHS jackets. I’ll suggest to the management a prize for the best beard--a record, say, of the complete works for harmonium.
Seems to me there was a time in my youth during which every book you picked up told you that the great modern German composers were Strauss, Reger, and Wolf--none of whom you were likely to hear on the Firestone Hour. But perhaps I'm wrong. A check of popular reference books from that departed era finds Reger more honored in the omission than in the observance (or something). The Standard Book of Celebrated Musicians (Garden City, 1937) includes George H. Clutsam, Ernesto Camillo Sivori, and Henry Smart (composer of "Bertha, or The Gnome of Hartzburg") but no Reger for example. Perhaps the author limited himself only to bearded composers! Moreover, works in English on Reger are not easy to find. German works there are aplenty--e.g. Max Reger at His Parents' or Max Reger as Father--but I won't find them in the University Library unless they've been translated into Pensilfawnia Deitsch.
Whatever the present state of Reger's reputation, it is obvious that MHS expects it to zoom sky-high in the musical stock market. Having given us the bulk (I use the word advisedly) of the music for chamber ensembles, organ, and one or more pianos, the Society appears now to be hacking away at the choral stuff. Some months back we got two of the four chorale-cantatas, and now here's another, plus eight sacred songs for a cappella mixed choir (a choir that includes non-Aryans, if converted). The sacred songs are apparently simple, no-nonsense hymnlike settings for use by unsophisticated parish choirs. The cantata follows the pattern of those previously issued, which is to say that if you like the "Passion Chorale,"" familiar from Bach's St. Matthew Passion, you'll love this one, for, to quote the annotator, its "melody is almost always in the forefront." In short. this is a recording (by a conductor and choir who have made many contributions to the choral discography) of religious music designed for practical turn-of-the century use. Having been steeped in Victorian-style religious music in my childhood, I've always thought that it was designed to test the religious stamina of churchgoers, but I'm sure, from the evidence, that it has a wide appeal to others. Anyone for Homer Rodeheaver?
