In my third concert, I decided to oppose Opus 15 with other Lieder that were composed in 1908 and 1909 and performed works by Pfitzner, Reger and Berg. While the first two contextualisations appeared to be logical points of departure in my exploration of Opus 15, as they were related to aspects that seemed more or less directly accessible through the score and offered the opportunity to potentially discover internal similarities between Opus 15 and the other repertoire in the form of a certain “performative feel” pertinent to the style or language of the poet and the composer respectively, the third contextualisation appeared to have less obvious benefits. Nevertheless, it seemed logical to continue the project by familiarising myself with
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Despite similar tendencies against four-bar phrases, for example in “Frühlingsfeier”, Reger’s music had a very different feel to me as a performer than Schönberg’s works. Reger’s dense harmonic style seemed in my view far away from the often thin and brittle sonority of Opus 15. While Reger asks for a lot of pedal in his scores of the duets, according to Steuermann “Schoenberg always insisted that his music be played almost without pedal”. Reger was a pianist and organist himself, and although he did not manage to maintain his technique after 1894 and was thus unable to play his most ambitious organ works that were composed later, he still performed and premiered, for example, the third of the duets Opus 111a in 1908. This might explain why these duets had a very pianistic and almost improvised feel to me. I could imagine Reger sitting in front of the piano and writing down what he plays. Reger was an expert in modulation, as his treatise “Beitrage zur Modulationslehre” (Supplement to the Theory of Modulation) illustrates. The sometimes surprising harmonies of the duets caused some difficulties for the singers in the initial learning stage, but once we were acquainted with them, the music felt rather natural and easy-going. Thus, the primary challenge that remained for me was that I had to relate to two singers in a concert otherwise consisting of solo Lieder, which required adjustments in balance and a different kind of flexibility in the
Despite similar tendencies against four-bar phrases, for example in “Frühlingsfeier”, Reger’s music had a very different feel to me as a performer than Schönberg’s works. Reger’s dense harmonic style seemed in my view far away from the often thin and brittle sonority of Opus 15. While Reger asks for a lot of pedal in his scores of the duets, according to Steuermann “Schoenberg always insisted that his music be played almost without pedal”. Reger was a pianist and organist himself, and although he did not manage to maintain his technique after 1894 and was thus unable to play his most ambitious organ works that were composed later, he still performed and premiered, for example, the third of the duets Opus 111a in 1908. This might explain why these duets had a very pianistic and almost improvised feel to me. I could imagine Reger sitting in front of the piano and writing down what he plays. Reger was an expert in modulation, as his treatise “Beitrage zur Modulationslehre” (Supplement to the Theory of Modulation) illustrates. The sometimes surprising harmonies of the duets caused some difficulties for the singers in the initial learning stage, but once we were acquainted with them, the music felt rather natural and easy-going. Thus, the primary challenge that remained for me was that I had to relate to two singers in a concert otherwise consisting of solo Lieder, which required adjustments in balance and a different kind of flexibility in the