Grateful thanks are due to our Honorary Member, Professor Wolfgang Stockmeier, for kind permission to reprint his article ‘Dichtung und Warheit’ from Musik und Kirche.

Our thanks are also due to Dr Harold Fabrikant, Fellow and Honorary Member of the Archive, who has provided an English translation of this article which reflects the significance of the composer’s life and work: an article which will be of considerable interest to all our members.

Seventy-five years ago, on 9th April 1933, the com­poser Sigfrid Karg-Elert died in Leipzig. Only slowly [in Germany] has awareness been attained of this Swabian – born in church-music. Today he has found his place in instruction and practice. Wolfgang Stockmeier recalls his enigmatic personality and works, which are always gauged according to Max Reger’s.

Wolfgang Stockmeier (b.1931) studied School-music, German, Classical Philology [the study of written records], Philo­sophy and Education; in 1957 [business] promotion; Emeritus Professor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the Cologne College of Music; international concert performer and adjudicator, including the USA and the Far East; compositions of all types; publications in Musicology and others for book-lovers.

A female student stated (it’s a long time ago and has been repeated frequently): “Since I have been playing works by Karg-Elert, have those of Reger considerably lost their importance for me?”

Must that be so? Is that to be understood? What is the basis for that? We try to supply a description of Karg-Elert’s personality when even the composer’s remarks concerning himself caused him difficulties. For he loved to circulate untruths (or to put it more mildly: mystific­ations) about himself, and if not untruths then at least inaccuracies.

There’s a handwritten autobiography of Karg-Elert up to the year 1907, which is stored in the files of Breitkopf & Härtel in the State Archive of Leipzig. In 1988 Günther Hartmann, in a synopsis, compared it with an essay by Émile Rupp from the year 1908 and pointed out inconsistencies (Mitteilungen der Karg-Elert-Gesellschaft [Reports of the Karg-Elert Society], 1990 edition).

It even starts with the birth-date. Karg-Elert made out he was two years younger, but that is without importance, for in almost the entire first half of his re­marks he avoids any precise detail of the year anyway. He says, by way of example, that he possessed an abnormal gift in mathematics even before the beginning of school lessons. According to “academic spheres in Augsburg and Munich” this talent aroused attention. We may ask: what sort of spheres? How come in Augsburg and Munich? [The family shifted house a great deal; they were in Munich from 1872 and Augsburg from 1874, coming to Oberndorf in time for Siegfried’s birth on 21st November 1877.

It is reasonable to presume that some contacts in these cities were retained.] Mind you, it is firmly entrenched that Karg-Elert distinguished himself throughout his life by a sharpness of mind in making no compromise in his theoretical publications. Thus it is for instance a pleasure to read of his break from the harmony teachings of Arnold Schönberg: “Heavens, is that dilettantish!” “The essence of Schönberg is com­pletely unknown. The external appearance he describes as effects, without having a premonition of their cause!” He criticises Schönberg’s naïvely-proud assertion that he “has never read a

history of music: if Schönberg presents a theory and has not a faint idea of the essence of harmony, he’s an ignoramus who stands beneath the cobbler, who himself is concerned with at least the most valuable information in his trade before he trains apprentices. Schönberg has never read a ‘textbook’.”

But in spite of all criticism leading him always to this sort of esteem, he never becomes personal. Thus is it also with his aesthetic judgement of Reger [even though] he doesn’t like Reger. In gauging Brahms, he is for him [K-E] an “imitation of acting big, putting it on”; in gauging Debussy, “colossal regarding content, ethical, upright, warmer than blood, but also loutish, hulking, savage, confused”; for Scriabin, “unoriginal, as of the renais­sance, solid, earthy”. But woe betide those who judge Reger thoughtlessly!

As an eleven-year-old in Grimma, Karg-Elert com­poses his first opera: Ave Maria [Hail Mary], “together with many erotic songs with and without piano accom­paniment”. Shortly after that he writes the four-act opera Das Mädchen von Zaragossa [The Maiden from Zaragossa]. He also composes “zealous” pieces for orchestra, among them two symphonies. Time and again the question of fact and fantasy arises. I suspect that Karg-Elert has surely never written only a solitary sym­phonic score, perhaps with the exception of the Piano Concerto in D minor, Op.6, his examination-work at the conclusion of his studies in Leipzig. Not proven are all the named works.

We make a leap in time and turn to the finished composer Karg-Elert. In Leipzig at the turn of the century he was an outsider. Reger and he had no mutual liking; and the unfortunate Straube did everything to deepen the gulf. A few years later, 1911, Karg-Elert dedicated to him [Straube] the magnum opus of his organ works, the Symphonic Chorale “Jesu, meine Freude” [“Jesu, my Joy”]. Was that an attempt to come closer to him?  Whenever I picture this man and