The German composer Max Reger grew up in a devout Catholic, musical family. His parents began teaching him the organ, piano and violin when he was five, and at 11 he started studying music theory with the organist Adalbert Lindner. Yet his parents were less than enthusiastic when he announced in 1888 that he wanted to become a composer. Shortly before, he had heard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Parsifal in Bayreuth, awakening a desire to compose that would not let him go. Two years later, he began studying with Hugo Riemann and published his first numbered work, a violin sonata.

Alongside composing, Reger earned his living as a pianist, organist, conductor and professor of composition. He had a particular fondness for the organ: at a time when French composers dominated its repertoire, he was one of the few German composers still writing major works for the instrument. His organ music is considered one of the most important contributions to the repertoire since J. S. Bach.

Bach was also one of Reger’s great role models. He saw him as ‘the beginning and end of all music’ and immersed himself in his contrapuntal writing. Reger’s admiration found expression in the Baroque forms and richly polyphonic textures of his own music, as well as in numerous transcriptions of Bach’s compositions, including arrangements of the six Brandenburg Concertos for piano duet. Among his colleagues, this earned him the nickname ‘the Bach of the modern age’.