Straube met the new century and his twenty-seventh birthday at full steam. His organ recitals continued unabated with music new and old. South in Weiden, Reger continued to hemorrhage music, including the minor explosion of three new Chorale Fantasies, op. 52. The autograph materials for nos. 2 and 3, based on the chorales “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme” and “Halleluja! Gott zu loben, bleibe meine Seelenfreud!” respectively, hint at a move toward independence from Straube's influence in the compositional process. In earlier instances, Reger had prepared his fair copies for the engraver only after his autographs for Straube, and this after the experience of the first performances. With “Wachet auf “ and “Halleluja,” though, the composer had already submitted his Reinschrift weeks before he dispatched Straube's personal copies to Wesel on October 22. Futhermore, both the latter manuscripts are incomplete, the “Halleluja” fugue trailing off into a sketch and then drying up altogether seven bars from the end with the note “from here composed directly into the printer's copy. This original manuscript is the property of Herr Karl Straube. Max Reger.” Op. 52, no. 3, thus presented him with a document insufficient to realize a complete performance. All three works would have to wait until mid- to late 1901 for their first airings, all by Straube.

Admittedly, there were a great many competing claims on Straube's time, outside the sheer number of practice hours required to negotiate the imposing solo programs to which he had accustomed himself by now. May 1900 brought Wesel's annual Lower Rhine Festival, and Straube had managed to secure a big commission for Reger to compose incidental music to Johanna Baltz's text “Castra vetera,” the name of an ancient Roman encampment nearby. Straube conducted the resulting work for chorus and orchestra at the Wesel Schützenhaus on May 6. It seems that the composer, who at the time had little experience in writing for orchestra, took on the project only as a personal favor to Straube, and that the subject matter did not engage him. Reger cited the piece to Gottschalg as a “hopeless work,” and it would remain his only foray into the genre of incidental music.