In the first half of the twentieth century, the twenty sonatas of the Munich-based composer Joseph Rheinberger (1839–1901) were a mainstay of the repertoire of most organists. They went somewhat out of fashion in the 1960s but are nowadays widely regarded once again as worthily complementing the organ works of such mainstream nineteenth-century figures as Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt and Brahms; and some of the movements are, indeed, as finely wrought as anything in the works of his more famous contemporaries. The Sonata No 4 in A minor, Op 98, dates from 1876 and has a sonata-form first movement with a second subject based on the ancient psalm melody
Tonus Peregrinus. The work is an example of cyclic form, and by dovetailing some twenty bars of its finale into the end of the first movement, a weightier conclusion is achieved, one which liberates that movement from the sonata and confers upon it independent status as
Fantasia on ‘Tonus Peregrinus’.
from notes by Relf Clark © 2008
