Reger is one of the men who develop muscles that hamper all grace and freedom of activity. One cannot help feeling that he went to the classic masters for their formulas in order to make of composition chiefly a mental exercise, that he accepted so many rules and manners and turns in order to free himself of the necessity of making free and full and spontaneous movements. With Reger, creation becomes routine. His works are stereotyped; stale terribly quickly. There are moments when one wonders whether he understood at all what creation is. For certainly, three-quarters of his compositions seem written out of no inner necessity, bring no liberation in their train. They are like mathematical problems and solutions, sheer brain-spun and unlyrical works. One is ever conscious in Reger that he is solving contrapuntal problems in order to astonish the vulgar herd of the professors. Reger certainly knew the art of talking with an astonishing show of logic, and yet saying nothing. Perhaps he talked continuously in order not to have to reflect. And for all his erudition, he understood his masters intellectually only. He felt himself called upon to continue the work of the three great "B's," and yet never understood the grand spirit that animated their art. Strauss, with his fine conduct of instruments through the score of "Salome," is nearer the spirit of Bach than Reger with all his fugues and double fugues ever got. No doubt, Reger loved the mathematical solidity and balance of the older music, and therefore sought to assimilate it. But he did more than just learn of it, as Brahms had done. He sought to rival the great men of the past on their own ground, to do what they did better than they had done it, to be able to say, "See, I can do the trick, too!" So we find him writing counterpoint for the sake of the learnedness and presumable respectability, rather than as a piece of expression. His compositions are overburdened and cluttered and marred by all sorts of erudite turns and twists and manoeuvers. The man's entire attention seems to have been set on making his works astonish the learned and make mad the simple. Even a slight song like "Wenn die Linde blueht" is decked with contrapuntal felicities. He copies the mannerisms of the composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, contorts his compositions with all manner of outmoded turns. He appears to have come to his worktable inevitably with his mind full of the compositions he had been studying. His impulse seems always a reflected thing, a desire to compete with some one on that person's terms. He writes fugues for organs and sonatas for violin solo under the influence of Bach, concerti grossi under the influence of Haendel, variations under that of Mozart, sonatas under that of Brahms. In vain one searches for a perfectly individual style throughout his works. The living man is buried under the mass of badly assimilated learning. Even at best, in the Hiller variations, in some of