Johann Baptist Joseph Maximilian Reger (1873-1916) was a German composer, pianist, organist, conductor and academic teacher of the late-Romantic period. Reger admired Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) in his all life, and he was influenced by the romantic musicians of his time, especially Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) who advocated absolute music and returned to tradition, and Richard Wagner (1813-1883) who developed chromaticism highly. All of these led to the more various and complex style of Reger’s music. Reger, which lived in between the middle period of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, his music features and compositional methods also became the basis of the modernism of music afterwards.

Only living forty-three years, Reger surprisingly left a great quantity of compositions, and among these works he composed thirty-six works for piano solo. However, until now Reger’s music is still not regarded widely outside Germany, and his piano works are very seldom performed.

This thesis mainly discusses Max Reger’s piano solo piece Improvisations, Op.18. It is divided into five chapters, and chapter one is introduction of the dissertation, introducing the motivation, purpose, range and method of research. Chapter two is about Reger’s life and the style of his music, exploring the features of his music and analyzing the composing methods of his piano music by realizing the influences on Reger by other musicians. Chapter three is aimed at the background and analysis of Improvisations, and chapter four is concentrated on the interpretations of this piece, besides explaining playing techniques and interpretations, also understanding the style of Reger’s performance by relevant resources. Finally, chapter five is a conclusion of the past four chapters.