At the beginning of 2008 at the Max-Reger-Institut (MRI) in Karlsruhe the Reger Edition of the Works (RWA) was initiated. Through a corresponding sponsorship on the part of the Union der Akademie der Wissenschaften it has become possible to take up again older efforts towards a Reger complete edition and, with the aid of three groups of works felt as especially urgent (organ works, lieder and choruses, arrangements), to develop exemplary editions satisfying present-day scholarly standards. The RWA is planned as a hybrid edition: Each of the altogether 28 volumes planned will be presented as edited music text printed in traditional form, together with an accompanying DVD-ROM equipped on the basis of Edirom for supplying further materials from the milieu of the edited works.

The Role of Edirom Within the Project

Cooperation between Edirom and RWA was first begun after the editorial work was started on the first volume. As a result, it was later necessary to adapt many contents compiled for a conventional edition, to a digital publication form. In addition to this conversion work, no longer necessary for subsequent volumes, intensively training the project co-workers and providing support service were part of the tasks of Edirom. At the same time, sound models and TEI-based data structures for the incorporation of the very extensive milieu information (sets of data for performance places, letters, people, institutions, organ dispositions, organ interpreters, reviews, publishing houses, as well as works in Max Reger’s personal, professional, and private contexts) had to be drafted and implemented. A further feature of the project arose from the strong, content-related references of the individual volumes, necessitating mechanisms for interlinking the contents of several Edirom versions.

It is the already partly achieved goal of the cooperation to develop on the basis of Edirom, workflows with which the co-workers of the RWA can be put in the position of being able independently to produce, actualize and publish editions. Close collaboration of the editorial office of Carus-Verlag responsible for the publication of RWA has proved to be markedly helpful above all in being able to optimize the program’s user guidance.

Publications

The first volume of the RWA appeared in March 2010 and was first introduced at the Frankfurt Music Fair. On 15 April 2010 the finished Hybrid-Edition was publicly presented in the framework of the opening ceremony at the start of the Reger Edition of the Works.

The second volume was presented in April 2011.