Program Notes, ©2012 Lori Newman
Program Notes
Johannes Brahms Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem) (1865 – 1868)
(Born 1833, Hamburg, Germany; died 1897, Vienna, Austria)
Johannes Brahms was not a religious man. In fact, he freely admitted to his biographer that he did not necessarily believe in the concept of life after death. The combination of these facts seems paradoxical for composing a Requiem, defined as a Mass for the dead. But Brahms was a man full of contradictions, so for his Requiem, he redefined the genre and instead of creating a Mass for the dead, created one for the mourners left behind on Earth, and in so doing, created something extraordinary. He often stated that he could replace the word “German” with “Human” and be left with a more accurate title for his groundbreaking work. Brahms never explicitly stated if he was inspired to write his Requiem for anyone in particular, but his mother who died in 1865 is certainly a possibility, as is the composer Robert Schumann, Brahms’s close friend and mentor, who died in 1856 after a long struggle with mental illness.
Instead of the traditional Latin Mass, Brahms chose to use the Lutheran Bible as his source (thus the word “German” in the title), and pieced together the text with selections from both the Old and New Testaments, as well as from the Apocrypha. Brahms does not include references to the Last Judgment, final pleas and prayers for the dead, and makes only a slight reference to redemption through the death of Jesus, and avoids any mention of Christ by name, thereby making it vastly different than its Catholic Requiem equivalent. Noted Brahms authority Karl Geiringer summed up these differences: “The Latin Requiem is a prayer for the dead, threatened with the horrors of the Last Judgment; Brahms’s Requiem, on the contrary, utters words of consolation, designed to reconcile the living with the idea of suffering and death. In the liturgical text whole sentences are filled with the darkest menace; in Brahms’s Requiem, each of the seven sections closes in a mood of cheerful confidence or loving promise.”
Ein deutsches Requiem premiered on April 10, 1868 (Good Friday) at the Bremen Cathedral with the composer conducting. This premiere did not include movement V which Brahms added later to increase the structural balance of the work. The fifth movement also contains the text, “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you,” perhaps indicating that Brahms’s mother was indeed an inspiration for the work. The premiere of all seven movements occurred in Leipzig on February 18, 1869. Brahms’s Requiem was the largest scale work he had, or would write, and immediately catapulted him to international renown. Within the first year of its premiere it was programmed more than twenty times throughout Europe. Its success allowed Brahms to focus more on composing; he was now more financially stable and could forego the conducting and piano soloist engagements that he would have had to previously take in order to earn his living.
The structure of Brahms’s Requiem is a study in unity and balance; not only with regards to the musical elements, but the extra-musical elements as well. As Walter Niemann noted, “The first half—the first through the third movements— is devoted almost entirely to earthly suffering, lamentation and mourning over the transitoriness and nothingness of human life, rather than to the consolation and the everlasting bliss of the redeemed. In the second half—the fourth through the seventh movements— mourning is gradually transformed, passing through the stages of pious faith, consolation, and joy in the living God, to celestial bliss and triumphant resurrection.”
The unity of structure is pronounced by how the movements relate to another. Each movement is balanced and related to another movement either by way of content or use of musical forces. Movements I and VII use some of the same material, often centering on the words “Selig sind,” (“Blessed are those”), with the first movement opening with these words and the last movement ending with them. Movements II and VI reflect the funereal mood of II versus the hope of the Resurrection of VI. Movements III and V employ a baritone solo for III (“Lord let me know mine end”) and a soprano solo for V (“Ye now have sorrow”), and IV is the transitive movement that guides us from sadness and grief, to comfort and acceptance.
The work as a whole is held together by two compositional devices that Brahms uses as building blocks for his Requiem: The first, a three-note motive that begins with the soprano entrance on the words “Selig sind,” is the main structural cell that Brahms uses to craft the entire Requiem. He subjects this three-note cell to every type of permutation a composer is able, and builds a masterpiece from a three-note motive consisting simply of a major third and a minor second.
The second device that permeates Brahms’s Requiem is a throwback to the chorales of J.S. Bach. It is no secret that Brahms had rediscovered the genius of Bach in his studies, but he takes his homage one step further, by including an uncanny shape and style of a Bach chorale melody in the opening viola line of movement I. Brahms then transposes this fragment to the minor key in the second movement’s opening vocal line, again creating a unity between the movements, as well as the Requiem as a whole. (Some scholars believe the phrase to be exactly derived from a chorale melody from Bach’s Cantata No. 27, but this is not a universally wide-held thought.)
The Requiem remains one of the most performed and beloved works in Brahms’s vast and varied repertoire. Besides the fact that the work is a compositional masterpiece, it is possible its popularity may be attributed to the fact that Brahms chose to avoid writing his Requiem with an overtly dogmatic or religion-specific message, but rather, he wrote a message in which all humans can relate: a Requiem for the people. •
Program Notes, Lori Newman
