5 - Reger

Summary

The splendidly decorated rooms of Frankfurt's Café Bauer served as a favorite meeting place for the city's residents and visitors alike. Centrally located around the corner from the stock market, the Bauer occupied the first two floors of a monumental structure completed in 1885 on the site of the old Bavaria brewery. The building exuded the expansionist spirit of optimism and progress typical of the Reich and the pulsing financial center of Frankfurt. Besides its dining and drinking spaces, it offered a capacious reading room as well as dedicated rooms for billiards and cards. If ever a modern Reger enthusiast would wish to have been a fly on the wall somewhere during the years of the composer's development, it would have been here, late on Tuesday evening, March 29, 1898, when Karl Straube and Max Reger enjoyed a long anticipated first meeting into the early hours of the following morning. The rendezvous was surely prearranged in correspondence now lost and lubricated by generous portions of Pilsner. In one of his first outward engagements during his Wesel tenure, Straube had come to Frankfurt to perform a series of three recitals in the nearby Paulskirche on March 29, April 1, and April 5. The church itself was a national symbol, having been selected as the site of the first assembly to elect a German parliament in the wake of the March Revolution of 1848. The organ, built by a young E. F. Walcker for the new edifice between 1829 and 1833, claimed a no less significant position in the history of German organ building. Erected directly above the chancel in an oval sanctuary, it offered a progressive disposition which emphasized gravity and fundamental tone in three manual and two pedal divisions, the latter played from two pedalboards and featuring a pair of open 32′ flue stops. The success achieved by this instrument, a consequential early step in the direction of nineteenth-century tonal concepts, launched its builder's career. Now the organ would play a key role in the advancement of Straube's own. The connections that brought him to Frankfurt are not known, but a highly publicized series of solo recitals in a historic venue was clearly no business-as-usual affair.