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A German Requiem/Ein Deutsches Requiem Johannes Brahms (1833 - 1897) |
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Die mit Tränen säen,
werden mit Freuden ernten (Those who sow with tears, shall reap with joy) |
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| Early in 1865, Johannes Brahms, aged 31, and recently moved to Vienna, received a telegram from his younger brother Fritz. ‘If you want to see our mother again,’ urged the telegram, ‘come at once.’ Brahms set out immediately, but found, on his arrival in Hamburg, that his mother had died of a stroke two days earlier. | |||||
| These events prompted Brahms to start work in earnest on a project he had apparently been considering for some time: a large-scale sacred work, for chorus and orchestra, which addressed fundamental human questions of the transience of life, and the hope for something beyond, in the words of Luther’s German translation of the Bible. We know from a letter to his lifelong friend Clara Schumann, in April 1865, that by then he had composed at least three movements of the work. More was written in early 1866, and the German Requiem was given a partial première in Vienna on 1st December 1867, at which the first three movements received a distinctly mixed welcome. The full six-movement work, as it then was, was performed on Good Friday, April 10th 1868, in Bremen cathedral, this time to huge acclaim. Even then, however, Brahms was not finished with his new masterpiece and, responding to a suggestion from his old teacher, Eduard Marxsen, added an extra movement, the fifth, for soprano solo and chorus. The work was published shortly afterwards, and received at least 20 performances that year. | |||||
| Brahms had been a successful and well-recognized composer before then, but the triumph of the German Requiem took his fame to much greater heights. After the première in Bremen, Karl Reinthaler, the cathedral organist and Director of Music, called it an ‘epoch-making work.’ Eduard Hanslick, the leading music critic in Vienna (and already a strong advocate of Brahms), wrote, ‘The German Requiem is a work of extraordinary significance and great mastery. To us it seems like one of the ripest fruits to have grown in the style of Beethoven’s last contributions to the field of spiritual music.’ | |||||
| But classifying this epoch-making work, according to recognised genres of sacred music, is somewhat difficult. Until that point, most works entitled ‘Requiem’ had been liturgical settings setting of the Latin Missa pro defunctis, or Mass for the Dead. By upbringing a Lutheran, politically a German nationalist, and (mostly) a supporter of Bismarck, Brahms was not interested in setting the traditional Latin text. There were a few precedents for German-language funeral music, including Schütz’s Musikalische Exequien, and Bach’s Cantata 106, known as Actus Tragicus. Like Brahms’s Requiem, these two works use texts from the Luther Bible, which, by the 1800s, was regarded as a monument of German literature, and an emblem of German nationhood. Unlike Brahms, the two earlier composers had intended their works to be used liturgically, as part of a burial service, and had included Lutheran hymns alongside the scriptural items. Brahms intended his work as a concert piece rather than a liturgical composition; nevertheless, by giving its première in church on Good Friday, the musical and liturgical highpoint of the Lutheran calendar, he was placing it alongside a tradition of liturgical music that included Bach’s Passion settings. Parts of the texts Brahms chose for movements 2, 3, and 7 can be found in the earlier funeral works by Schütz and Bach. In addition, there are echoes of Handel’s Messiah, both in the subtitle that refers to ‘words taken from Holy Scripture’, and in the texts chosen for the sixth movement. | |||||
| The symmetry of Brahms’s seven-movement structure has often attracted comment. The close similarity of the words (‘Blessed are they that mourn’, and ‘Blessed are the dead’), as well as the music, in movements 1 and 7, create a sense of return and resolution. In linking the outer movements, Brahms was following the example of several settings of the Latin Requiem (most famously Mozart’s). The first movement juxtaposes the words of the Beatitudes with Psalm 126, which seems to have been central to Brahms’s conception of his libretto. First, its images of sowing and reaping morph into the wilting grasses and fading flowers of the next movement. Secondly, the footnotes to that Psalm in Brahms’s bible, which has survived to be examined by scholars, cross refer the reader to (amongst other texts), Matthew 5: 4 (movement 1), James 5: 7-8 (movement 2), Isaiah 35: 10 (movement 2), and John 1: 20-22 (movement 5). Both the second and third movements open by reflecting on the frailty of life. The second movement begins with a funeral march in the key of Bb minor, which Brahms had written nearly a decade earlier, in 1856, as part of a projected symphony. The third movement introduces the baritone soloist, who sings of the days of man being a handbreadth. Both these movements end, however, with triumphant, fugal declarations of eternal hope. The central fourth movement, How lovely are thy dwellings fair, fulfils the same function as the Sanctus in a Latin Requiem, as it serenely describes the promised paradise. The soaring soprano solo of the fifth movement, the last to be composed, promises a mother’s comfort, then the sixth, and most dramatic movement, tells of the last trumpet, the final victory over death, and the song of the redeemed in heaven. Rather than ending on this triumphant note, however, Brahms chooses to conclude his Requiem by returning to themes of consolation and rest, using a text which he would have heard during his mother’s burial service, according to the Lutheran rite, in February 1865. | |||||
| Brahms’s own religious beliefs have attracted plenty of speculative comment, partly because he was reticent about discussing them, or any other personal matters, and partly because his choice of texts for the Requiem leaves open a number of questions about what he intended them to mean. Brahms was baptised and confirmed in the Lutheran church as a child; he was a daily reader of the Bible and owned an extensive collection of theological books. He did not attend church as an adult, and is thought by most biographers to have been sceptical about the dogmas of conventional Christianity. Dvorak, a devout and orthodox Catholic, once had a conversation with Brahms about religion which ended with Dvorak commenting, sorrowfully, ‘He believes nothing.’ His Requiem leaves out descriptions of the last judgement, and prayers for the dead, both of which are major components of the Latin service, although prayers for the dead were not part of Lutheran doctrine. It has often been noted that Brahms avoids direct references to Jesus, although he does quote words spoken by Jesus (in movements 1 and 5), and words addressed to him in heaven (in movement 6). He was challenged about this by Reinthaler, who felt that, in order to be performed in church on Good Friday, the piece needed an explicit statement of the Christian doctrine of redemption. Brahms refused, saying that he could do without verses like John 3: 16, a prominent text in Schütz’s Musikalishe Exequien, and a cornerstone of Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith, and that he could happily have titled the piece a ‘human’ (menschlich), rather than a German requiem. Reinthaler solved his doctrinal problems at the Bremen performance by inserting Handel’s ‘I know that my redeemer liveth’, after the fourth movement; this may have convinced Brahms to add the eventual fifth movement, for soprano soloist. However, for Brahms to construct a libretto out of his own choice of excerpts from the Bible was an act very much in the Lutheran tradition of discovery of God through personal reflection on the scriptures. Comfort for the living is indeed a recurring theme; however, the resurrection of the dead, and the hope for the world to come, feature at least as prominently. Brahms may have considered the piece a Human Requiem, but inasmuch as the consolation it offers depends ultimately on the life hereafter, it is far from a humanist one. | |||||
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