Rife with ambiguity, Reger's music hovers uneasily between Romanticism and Modernism, tradition and a deeply troubled individual expression verging on expressionism. It is a music whose conflicting debts to Liszt and the Wagner of Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal melds uneasily with admiring emulation of Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms to forecast developments pursued in the musics (the plural is inescapable) of Hindemith, Berg, and Schoenberg. While in the course of his lamentably short life, his style never ceased to evolve, and Reger's Tristan-derived harmonic idiom appears full-blown in the tremendous spate of organ works composed around the turn of the century. A stint of compulsory military service between 1896 and 1898, from which he was given an early discharge, left him physically ill and spiritually disoriented. He recuperated slowly through creative work at the family home in Weiden until he was sufficiently strong enough to embark upon a career as a pianist and organist in the summer of 1901. He was already controversial, having begun to publish his works in 1895. A keenly felt spiritual malaise in the fin de siècle/i> culture at large is reflected in the several chorale fantasias for organ in which the time-honored gestures of piety and solace are rendered with disturbing turbulence. Playing around seven minutes, the Introduction and Passacaglia for organ afford a compact conspectus of this idiom, prompted by a request for contributions to an album to support the construction of an organ in Schönberg im Taunas in 1899. Though Reger remarked that "The passacaglia is a piece that any organist of some skill should be able to play at sight," that is hardly likely. The harmonically acerb Introduction, rippled with toccata-like pseudo-Baroque—or Gothic—ornamentation, is replete with an arrestingly peremptory, craggy grandeur flaring briefly to subside before the sotto voce announcement of the Passacaglia's creeping ground bass garlanded with a dozen variations whose progress exhibits a slippery Tristan-esque chromaticism, garbed as Bachian counterpoint, as the subsidiary voices pursue ever more fragmented and fantastic variations. The steady tread of the reiterated ground and the final tying up, in the last variation, with motivic references to the Introduction, provide a formal tightness belied by the work's overall spiritual tumult to provide a prescient aural image of cultural crisis and disintegration that would find more elaborate expression in such knotted works as Busoni's Fantasia Contrappuntistica, Hindemith's opera Mathis der Maler, Schoenberg's symptomatically unfinished oratorio Die Jakobsleiter, and his likewise uncompleted opera Moses und Aron.

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