Into the Score: Brahms Requiem

Welcome to Into the Score! Below you’ll find two short videos, one longer video, links, and a brief essay that take you into the world of Brahms’s Ein deutches Requiem. I hope these resources will help you gain a clearer picture of the context in which this magnificent, moving piece was created. —RJB

Origins: Magic Wands and Prophecies

This brief video delves into the origins of the Requiem, its place in Brahms’s career, and the prophecies of the Schumanns.

“I have chosen my text because I am a musician, and because I needed them.”

For a complete table of Brahms’s chosen texts, with translations, click HERE

This short video delves into the text that Brahms selected and assembled, himself, for his Requiem.

You can access the full score of the Requiem HERE, at imslp.org.

In this video, RJB takes you into the music itself. He highlights one of the principal motives of the work, and then takes you into each movement to share a magical moment.  

To access a YouTube video of a recording of the entire piece, in a gorgeous recording conducted by Philippe Herreweghe, click HERE.

“deutsches”

Rather than set the traditional Latin Requiem texts or even borrow their imagery, Brahms hand-picked and edited scripture from various the well-worn pages of his cherished childhood copy of Luther’s German bible Bible to create an original textual collage. Brahms’s carefully edited selections give his work a broad ecumenical reach. His choices highlight notions such as comfort, joy, reassurance, and reward for patience and personal effort and 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 the way he treasured the German literary heritage of the Luther Bible, but as he explained to Carl Rheinthaler, the chorus master for the premiere, he would have just as happily used “menschliches” (“human”). During the preparation 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.”  (Rheinthaler added a performance of Handel’s “I Know My Redeemer Liveth” to the program.). Brahms wrote to Rheinthaler, “I would dispense with places like John 3:16. [“God so loved the world that he gaveth his only begotten son.”] I have chosen my texts because I am a musician, and I needed them.”

a piece for our time, and for all times

Here’s an excerpt from a program essay written for a performance of Brahms’s Requiem with Princeton Pro Musica

Any encounter with a composer’s “glimpse into the mysteries of the spirit world” is refracted through the lens of our current world context and tinted by our own emotional filters. In 2012, I led Princeton Pro Musica through the swirling, shadowy strands that open Mozart’s Requiem as Hurricane Sandy churned in the Atlantic, hours from landfall. Urgency and uncertainty flowed from the text through the music into our bodies. In the summer and fall of 2017, during the preparation for a performance of Brahms Requiem, it was impossible to ignore that our burgeoning global population, though more technologically advanced than ever, dwells in 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. Now we face new fires, new storms, and the loss of more than one million lives to COVID-19. And we have all faced our own personal storms of a more personal nature. , including, inevitably, Loss the loss of a loved one. Challenges to our core beliefs. Frustrations with friends and family. Beyond the simple sensory pleasure of hearing beautiful sounds, we each experience music through these lenses and filters you have arrived with this evening or what,. if anything beyond Surely some among usI have no way of knowing which the pleasure of hearing beautiful music, you hope the Requiem will give to you. Pieces as layered and profound as Ein deutsches Requiem have a way of revealing to us that in fact we needed something more, or something different, than from what we anticipated.

At the time he composed the Requiem, Brahms needed to experience and process his own grief, and to look for some hope beyond it. The conductor Jonathan Khuner, considering Brahms’s Schicksalslied, mused that for Brahms, the root of human suffering is “the combination of our restless, homeless, buffeted condition and our ability to imagine and to yearn for a state of perfect unconscious bliss akin to that in which the gods live. And the answer to this torment? Brahms creative life is in its entirety a struggle to answer it.” In Brahms’s own time, “progress” was being reconciled with the cyclical rhythms of agrarian life. A few weeks after his mother died, Brahms wrote to Clara Schumann: “Time changes everything for better or worse… . . . It does not so much change as it builds up and develops, and thus when once this sad year is over I shall begin to miss my dear good mother ever more and more.” The genius of Brahms’s Requiem, for me, is the way it ends almost ends where it began, and in between offers music that can meet each listener of us wherever she we happens to be. It gently resists frightening us with operatic depictions of medieval judgment or leaving seducing us in with ethereal, 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, and the whole thing ends with a sweep of hope from the harps.

Just before Brahms would put pen to paper to create his masterpiece, an ocean away, a melancholic but ultimately hopeful politician perfectly encapsulated what I, at this moment, in this year, hear Brahms’s words and music saying to me. Abraham Lincoln, in a speech to the Wisconsin State Agricultural society in 1859, after extolling the virtues of steam power and consoling farmers facing disappointing yields, shared this:

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "“And this, too, shall pass away." .” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! -- —how consoling in the depths of affliction! "“And this, too, shall pass away." .” And yet let us hope it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.

Read RJB’s full essay on the Requiem HERE