With the beginning of the concert season in October 1915 Reger’s quiet creative period in Jena comes to an end. Under the difficult travel conditions of the war, Reger again rushes through German and Dutch concert halls and travels to his weekly conservatoire lessons in Leipzig. In March 1916 he is declared permanently unfit for military service. Only after the end of the season does he turn to composition again. His Andante and Rondo capriccioso in A major dedicated to Adolf Busch, with which he hoped to correct the shortcomings of the Violin Concerto in the same key, Op. 101 – its massive instrumentation and its length – remains a fragment (WoO I/10). On 10 May he completes his last day of lessons at the conservatoire and succumbs to a heart failure in the night of 11 May in the Leipzig hotel »Hentschel«.

Memorial concerts are organised all over Germany and already in July the close friends unite to form a Max Reger Society. Elsa Reger’s plans of converting the Jena villa into a permanent memorial place is not realised because of the upcoming economic crisis.