25/01/2025

Programme notes for Ein deutsches Requiem, Op 45

Johannes Brahms (1832-1897)

Ein deutsches Requiem, a German Requiem, was published in 1856 shortly after the death of Brahms’s great friend, Robert Schumann. Rather than as a commemorative mass for the dead, it seems that Brahms conceived the work as a resource for comfort and hope to the living and bereaved – perhaps in the first instance for Schumann’s wife, the composer Clara Schumann.

“It was such a joy as I have not felt for a long time…” (Clara Schumann, journal entry, 10th April 1868)

Johannes sent Clara the words for movements one and two before he shared the music with her, asking her approval in choosing German above Latin. The theme of comforting the bereaved runs throughout, most overtly in the text of the first and fifth movements. One line in the third movement could sum up the meaning of the whole work: “Wess soll ich mich trösten?”, which translates as “How shall I console myself?”

The work is, in essence, about the search for comfort in the face of grief.

The Requiem is scored for a four-part choir with orchestra. However, for our performance, we are using Brahms’s alternative scoring with piano-duet accompaniment (four hands on one piano), the version used at the first complete performance of the Requiem in London in July 1871. On that occasion, the work was sung in English, but tonight we are performing it in German.

For musical material, Brahms turned to abandoned fragments from his aborted first symphony. That music became the core of the German Requiem’s brilliant second movement, “Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras” (“For all flesh is as grass”). From there, the work blossomed, even though Brahms was waylaid from the project at times by other work. He completed a six-movement version of the piece in 1866, and the first three movements were premiered at a concert in Vienna on 1st December 1867. Astonishingly, that performance was met with booing and hissing from the audience. Blame this time, though, was laid at the feet of the timpanist at the first performance, who reportedly played so loudly during the fugal section of the third movement that he drowned out the entire orchestra and chorus. At the first performance of the six-movement version of the German Requiem, the composer was finally redeemed; both the public and the critics lauded the work as a groundbreaking achievement in German music. Brahms himself was not fully satisfied, however, and he soon inserted the glorious fifth movement out of concern that his creation was too dour. The movement, which features a radiant solo for soprano, was a memorial to his mother, and it quickly became one of the piece’s most beloved sections. In this seven-movement version, the German Requiem was heard no fewer than 20 times in Germany in its first year of existence.