Johann Baptist Joseph Maximilian Reger was born on 19 March 1873 at Brand in Bavaria, the eldest child of a schoolteacher and amateur musician, in a devout Catholic family that moved to Weiden in 1874. He learned organ, violin and cello from his father and piano from his mother at five, and from 1884 to 1889 took lessons with Adalbert Lindner, often deputising for him at the parish church. A visit to the Bayreuth Festival in 1888, where he heard Die Meistersinger and Parsifal, decided him on music; Hugo Riemann replied encouragingly to the 120-page orchestral overture he wrote that summer, and Josef Rheinberger recognised the talent in two chamber works sent to him in 1889. He studied theory with Riemann at Sondershausen from 1890 and then at Wiesbaden, married Elsa von Bercken in 1902 — and was excommunicated for it, she being a divorced Protestant — and died on 11 May 1916.

He moved to Munich in September 1901 and appeared in ten concerts in his first season as organist, chamber pianist and accompanist; from 1907 he was musical director at the Leipzig University Church and professor at the Royal Conservatory there, and from 1911 Hofkapellmeister at the court of Duke Georg II of Saxe-Meiningen, giving up the post in 1914 for his health. His output began in Lieder, chamber music, choral works and pieces for piano and organ, and turned later to the orchestra with the Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart of 1914 and the four tone poems after Böcklin of 1913. The choral-orchestral works — Gesang der Verklärten (1903), Der 100. Psalm (1909), Der Einsiedler and the Hebbel Requiem (both 1915) — and the large organ works are the body of his music that stayed in use.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Reger
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q57139