Max Reger - Four Tone Poems after Arnold Böcklin's pictures, Op. 128

Max Reger

Four Tone Poems after Arnold Böcklin's pictures, Op. 128  

Max Reger - 4 Tone Poems after Arnold Böcklin's pictures for orchestra, Op. 128, 1913. Reger was inspired by the painter Arnold Böcklin, a painter whose favorite subjects were the fantastic and the morbid. These tone paintings range from the moody and mysterious to the carefree. The present suite is a programmatic representation of four paintings by the Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901). Here, the composer chose images of alternatingly contrasting moods (yearning - playful - meditative - festive) as inspirations for each respective movement.


Reger's short tone poems correspond to four Böcklin canvases:

I. Der geigende Eremit (Hermit Playing the Violin): Molto sostenuto
The tone of Hermit Fiddler is one of quiet longing. In Böcklin’s work, an old monk performs alone at a shrine of the Madonna while curious cherubim listen. Reger’s hermit - solo violin - voices a reverent melody that is answered by the woodwinds and carried over richly sonorous chords in the strings. The first represents a devoutly fiddling hermit being watched - unbeknownst to him - by three curious cherubs.

II. Im Spiel der Wellen (In the Play of the Waves): Vivace
After a sweeping introduction, the second movement bursts into a swirling triplet feel, embracing Böcklin’s portrayal of young humans and their satyr/centaur companions “In the Play of the Waves”. Is an ocean scene, with dismayed Nereids intruded upon by randy swimming Centaurs. Churning swells in the orchestra evoke the crash of water to shore, while woodwinds dance, converse, and delight amidst the ever-shifting flow of a musical sea. In Play amidst the Waves depicts water sprites leaping and playing in the water in a vigorous yet delicate scherzo.

III. Die Toteninsel (The Isle of the Dead): Molto sostenuto
The third movement is "The Isle of the Dead", a coffin is borne to the eternally silent Isle of the Dead. Reger’s somber third movement is based upon Böcklin’s most famous work, “The Isle of the Dead,” of which the artist created five versions between 1880 and 1886. The painting depicts a figure, shrouded in white, standing in a small rowboat that is moving towards the shadowy inlet of an imposing, desolate island. It shows a vessel bearing a shrouded figure silently gliding towards a cypress, girt island; the mood is mysterious and bleak. The haunting image also inspired Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, who penned his own symphonic tone poem of the same name in 1908. In Reger’s interpretation, intense moments in the orchestra swell up and die away as the human spirit, in its final moments, struggles against Fate.

IV. Bacchanal: Vivace
The closing "Bacchanale" has been described as a German beer festival in ancient Roman dress. Not wishing to dwell on such melancholy themes (or perhaps looking to deny them), the final-movement “Bacchanal” bursts forth with delirious energy, taking the entire orchestra on a whirlwind ride that would befit the grandest of Pagan festivals. "The Bacchanale" shows merrymakers brawling around a Roman tavern; it is a flighty and emotional. This intriguing music uses a fully late-romantic harmonic vocabulary and well-conceived orchestral colors. After a brief mid-movement repose, the revelry comes unhinged, going for broke in a full-on, tumbling gallop to the end.


Reger's music is richly late Romantic, with that era's tendency to excess being held in check by Reger's formidable background in formal procedures. Although Reger's death in 1916 places him somewhat outside the era of true Romanticism, his devotion to art and literature, as well as to music, made him a Romantic deep down. (These late works date from 1912-13.). Reger, thanks to his experience as a conductor, was a master of orchestral sound. Among Germans of his era, he had a few peers, and hearing a work such as the Romantic Suite puts one in mind more of Franck than of Reger's near contemporary Richard Strauss.