Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requiem

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DIRECTOR'S NOTES

"If he will only point his magic wand to where the powers amassed in the orchestra and chorus  lend him its might, yet more wonderful glimpses into the mysteries of the spirit world await us."

Thus predicted Robert Schumann in 1853 about the then twenty-year-old Johannes Brahms. Johannes had impressed Robert and his wife Clara with his piano compositions, and they hoped the talented young man would contribute to the great Beethovenian symphonic tradition of the nineteenth century. Brahms set to work on a symphony around 1855, but it wasn’t until 1876, more than twenty years later, that he managed to emerge completely from the shadow of  Beethoven’s Ninth and complete his own symphony. But it wasn’t Brahms’s first symphony that established him on the German musical scene; it was, instead, Ein deutsches Requiem, completed eight years earlier—the longest piece he would ever write.  

Loss. Grief. Mortality. Among the composers who have dared to confront these inevitabilities, some have created compositions of immense power and, sometimes, conjured portals through which we might gain the “glimpses into the mysteries of the spirit world” that Schumann imagined. Each such piece reflects the circumstances under which it was written. Consider, for example, Mozart and his Requiem. Scribbling feverishly in the final days of his tragically curtailed life, the thirty-five-year-old Mozart poured out his grief, emphasizing the urgency and uncertainty animating the traditional Catholic Requiem text. With just two movements fully scored and the fate of his soul unknown, Mozart ended his manuscript—and life’s work—with sketchy indications of the agitated “Confutatis,” breaking off just eight measures into the  tearful sighs of the “Lacrymosa.” As for Brahms: In 1854, his mentor and great champion Schumann entered an asylum following a suicide attempt and died there two years later, at just forty-six. Stricken with grief, Brahms outlined a piece that would become the basis of the second movement of the Requiem. In 1865, Brahms received a shocking telegram from his brother: “If you want to see our mother alive again, come immediately.” Brahms arrived moments too late. He spent much of the winter of 1866 working on the Requiem, and dedicated it to his mother.  

The libretto Brahms himself created is a work of art in its own right. Rather than set the traditional Catholic Requiem or draw on its imagery, Brahms hand-picked and edited scripture from the well-worn pages of his cherished childhood copy of Luther’s German Bible to create an original textual collage. Brahms’s selections lend his work broad ecumenical reach. They highlight notions of comfort, joy, reassurance, and reward for patience and personal effort while eschewing others, such as judgement, vengeance, religious symbolism, and, notably, the sacrifice of Christ for human sin. Brahms’s use of deutsches (“German”) in the title suggests his reverence for the German literary heritage of the Luther Bible, but as he told Carl Rheinthaler, the chorus master for the premiere, he would have just as happily used menschliches (“human”). While preparing for the premiere, Rheinthaler anxiously admonished the composer, “the work lacks the whole point on which the Christian religion turns, the sacrificial death of  Christ” (and felt compelled to tack on a performance of Handel’s “I Know My Redeemer Liveth” in the concert). Brahms responded, “I would dispense with places like John 3:16. I have chosen my texts because I am a musician, and I needed them.”  

In the first two movements, Brahms chooses not to address the dead, but living mourners: “Blessed are they who carry sorrow, for they shall be comforted . . . they who sow in tears will reap in joy.” The second movement expands these ideas: “all flesh is like grass, and the glory of man is like a flower that withers.” Brahms pairs this with a bid for patience, like the farmer who waits for rains to water the fruits of the earth. At the end of the second movement, sorrow again gives way to joy, now everlasting. The third movement shifts the perspective to the individual, represented by the baritone, contemplating his own destiny. His question, “Now lord, how shall I find comfort?” beckons a repetition from the chorus and the response: “I hope in you.” The third movement also ends with assurance. The fourth movement, a departure, paints a picture of “lovely dwellings” and a state of blessedness removed from earthly suffering. In the fifth, the impact of the first-person, subjective point of view is striking, as it was in the  third movement. But where the baritone there announced: “Behold my days are as a  handbreadth before Thee, and my life is as nothing,” here the soprano assures: “Behold me: I have had a little time for toil and torment and now have found great consolation.” The sixth movement returns us to the plural perspective and portrays a community wandering in search of its home. As the movement continues, the baritone returns, now as a voice of authority from on high, portending a changed state for our souls. The word Tod (“death”) is presented for the first time, but only in the context of its defeat. The seventh and final movement recalls the assurances of the first, but now it is the dead who are blessed, for “they rest from their labors,”  and “their works follow after them.” Brahms has thus created an arc: The first three  movements deal with the struggle to accept death and the transience of life, the fourth depicts a state of blessedness, and the last three suggest reconciliation to and victory over death.  Repetitions of selig (“blessed”) bookend and bind the work together.  

But as Brahms himself wrote, “I have chosen my texts because I am a musician, and I needed them.” All of Brahms’s compositional choices can be understood to elucidate those textual choices. To emphasize the theme of assurance, Brahms ends the second, third, and sixth movements end with a fugue, a compositional procedure built from adherence to a central  idea. The second movement’s fugue unfolds over thirty-five measures of B-flat, depicting the text’s “everlasting joy.” The third movement’s ends with a pedal tone on low D that flows unbroken for thirty-six measures while angular counterpoint churns above it, performing, in a way, the firm faith that “no torment shall touch them.” After evoking the sting of death and the tortures of hell with harmonic tempests, Brahms closes the sixth movement with a hymn of praise in plain old C major whose conspicuously simple fugue subject outlines all of the notes in the C-major scale (“for you have created all things”).  

Much of Brahms’s meaning, and the answer to the text’s central questions about comfort, falls between the lines, in the wordless passages of the orchestra. There are strikingly few passages in which the orchestra merely doubles the choral parts. Brahms manipulates various musical parameters to highlight the difference between dark and light, sorrow and comfort, and other dualities. One such parameter is orchestration—who plays and sings which lines. The opening of the work wraps the ear in the velvety sounds of violas, cellos, and basses divided into six interweaving lines, with subtle smoothing-over from the horns. The choir enters quietly, without accompaniment, in a stark, haunting response to the string choir. The altos’ delivery in the first movement of the full statement “Blessed are they who mourn” is crowned by a glowing, weightless halo of flutes, oboes, and solo horn, with no supporting accompaniment. Other statements smolder with the darker glow of a trio of trombones. Brahms introduces the inimitable plush pluck of harps at “they who sow tears,” only to draw us to their jaunty triplets at “shall come with joy.” The second movement’s somber funeral march, grounded by the low  rumble of contrabassoon and contrabass, contrasts subsequent music of delicious lightness, gently sprinkling raindrops of flutes, harps, and pizzicato strings.  

The heart of the work—the fourth and fifth movements—stands apart from the rest. The fourth flows along in a fluid triple meter, the high winds dancing in counterpoint with singing cellos like the petticoats of Viennese waltzers twirling weightlessly in an otherworldly ballroom, reveling in a state of blessedness. The fifth movement’s languid pace and iridescent haze of muted, dolce strings transport us to another place entirely. We hear a solo voice—not a  baritone but a soprano—spinning out a silken melody in her top register as if in slow motion.  But it’s not all soft and sweet. At the sixth movement’s depiction of the last trumpet and the ensuing battle with death, Brahms does not disappoint, marshaling a full flex of orchestral muscle from blasting tuba to shrieking piccolo.  

On the large scale, the music of the Requiem rises toward the fourth movement, then arcs back down to its close at the end of the seventh. On the small scale, too, Brahms continually evokes ups and downs. The opening melody of the cellos and violas rises a few steps but then falls, its feet mired in the weight of the dense harmonies. The somber chant melody of the second  movement rises just enough to feel like it’s getting somewhere, but then collapses on itself, withering as the blooms on the grass. But elsewhere, Brahms inserts signs of hope: At the very end of the work the harps, silent since the second movement, dramatically re-enter, rolling  from the bottom of their range to the top. Though harps and winds ascend, the trombones keep one foot on the ground. Both the dead and the living are represented in this final  moment. Is Brahms implying that comfort is an escape to heaven? Is he providing a vision of the resurrection, from Revelation? Is he merely trying to lead us from dark, burdened sounds to  something lighter? He doesn’t give it text; while the choir murmurs “blessed, blessed,” Brahms leaves that determination to the ears and hearts of the individual listener.  

Any encounter with a composer’s “glimpse into the mysteries of the spirit world” is refracted  through our present moment. In my first concert with PPM ten years ago, the shadowy, plaintive opening of Mozart’s Requiem slowly filled the concert hall as Hurricane Sandy churned in the Atlantic, hours from landfall. Urgency and uncertainty flowed from the text through the music into our bodies. When we last heard Brahms’s Requiem, in 2017, I noted: “it was impossible to ignore a natural world that cannot be tamed, whose winds whip through trees and fuel fires, whose seas swell and spill into our streets, and whose very foundations can tremble beneath us.” And now? The years since have been shadowed by a global wave of grief and widespread strife. We have no magic wand to wave. But, for me, at least, Ein deutsches  Requiem resonates and comforts more than ever before. It ends almost where it began, reflecting life’s cycles. It neither frightens us with operatic depictions of medieval judgment nor seduces us with saccharine, palliative visions of paradise. Just as each day has its ups and downs, each month its good days and its bad, and each year its high season and its off season, within each movement of the Requiem, sorrow dances with comfort, tears mingle with joy, the transient withers while the everlasting abides. In light of the uncertainty that surrounds us, how fortunate we are that this deeply layered work of art exists, whenever and however we need it.