page_title: Vier Tondichtungen nach A. Böcklin
section_title: Die Toteninsel
hierarchical_section_title: Vier Tondichtungen nach A. Böcklin / Structure and scoring / Die Toteninsel
caption_attribution_description: 3rd version
context_page_description: Vier Tondichtungen nach A. Böcklin, Op. 128, is a composition in four parts for orchestra by Max Reger, based on four paintings by Arnold Böcklin, including Die Toteninsel. He composed them in Meiningen in 1913.
context_section_description: Die Toteninsel (Isle of the Dead) is based on a painting of the same name that Böcklin made in five different versions between 1880 and 1886. The painting has been regarded Böcklin's most famous work, with a title not by Böcklin himself, but the art dealer Fritz Gurlitt. Thomas Mann characterized the painting as expressing Sympathie mit dem Tode (sympathy with death), typical for the fin de siècle. A composition based on the painting by Andreas Hallén appeared in 1897, others followed, including a piece of the same title by Serge Rachmaninoff in 1909. Reger writes "long-held but shifting sonorities", using the orchestra like an organ.
  Max Beckschäfer arranged Reger's movement for organ in 1984. He played it first at the Marktkirche Wiesbaden in 1985, along with the organ part of his arrangement of Reger's Hebbel Requiem.
caption: Isle of the Dead, 1883
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