Johannes Brahms  
(Born 1833, Hamburg, Germany; died 1897, Vienna, Austria)

 

 

Program Notes

Ein deutsches Requiem 

 

On February 2, 1865, Johannes Brahms received an urgent telegram from his brother Fritz: “If you want to see our mother once again, come immediately.” Brahms hurried from Vienna to Hamburg, but he did not arrive in time to say goodbye. Shortly thereafter, he dedicated himself to composing a Requiem.

 

It is tempting to draw straight line between these two events, but at the time of his mother’s death, 33-year-old Brahms had already spent several years working on what would later become Ein deutsches Requiem. Some biographers point to the death of his close friend and mentor, Robert Schumann, nine years previously, as the catalyst for this work, but the composer never explicitly stated that his Requiem was written for any one person; in fact, he emphasized the work’s universality. When a conductor expressed concern that the Requiem made no mention of Jesus, Brahms replied, “As far as the text is concerned, I will confess that I would very gladly omit the ‘German’ and simply put ‘of Mankind,’ also quite deliberately and consciously do without passages such as John 3:16.”  The significance of John 3:16 is the limitations this familiar text places on salvation: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Brahms wanted his Requiem to speak to all people, not just Germans and not just Christians.

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Brahms drew the text for his Requiem from Christian sources—not the traditional Catholic, Latin text, but passages chosen from the Lutheran Bible and apocrypha. Karl Geiringer, a noted Brahms authority, summed up the 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.”

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Like many great works, Ein deutsches Requiem evolved over time. In 1854, Brahms composed a two-piano work that eventually became the funeral march opening of the second movement. He began writing preliminary sketches of the Requiem in 1857, shortly after Schumann’s death, but the serious, focused composition occurred from 1865-68. The first three movements were premiered on December 1, 1867 in Vienna. By 1868, he had composed a six-movement version accompanied by piano, four hands. A six-movement orchestra version—lacking movement V, which was added later—premiered on April 10, 1868 (Good Friday) at the Bremen Cathedral, with the composer conducting. The premiere of all seven movements occurred in Leipzig in February, 1869. By 1876, the Requiem had been performed at least 79 times throughout Europe, bringing Brahms the fame his mentor Schumann had predicted many years before.

 

Ein deutsches Requiem was Brahms’ largest work in any medium. Steven Ledbetter, musicologist and long-time program annotator for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, aptly describes its significance: “Here for the first time, Brahms not only established himself as a mature composer in the eyes of his contemporaries, but also wrote one of those special choral works that singers return to with as much delight as audiences, a unique masterpiece of technique and affect expressing the universal longings of mankind.”

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