On Brahms's Ein deutsches Requiem

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 this 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.

Over the course of our lives we will all suffer the loss of loved ones, and eventually we’ll each face the end of our own life. Composers who have dared to respond to this grim reality 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,” and broke off just eight measures into the tearful sighs of the “Lacrymosa.” In 1854, Brahms’s mentor and great champion Schumann entered an asylum following a suicide attempt and a long battle with mental illness. He died there two years later, in 1856, 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 to find that she had just died. He spent much of the winter of 1866 working on the Requiem. It is clear from the texts he chose that the work was written not just for his mother, to whom it is dedicated, but also for Brahms himself, and for all who remain and mourn the loss of their loved ones.

Brahms’s text for the Requiem is itself a work of art. Rather than set the traditional Latin Requiem texts or even borrow their 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 carefully edited selections give his work broad ecumenical reach. His choices 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.” (Rheinthaler added a performance of Handel’s “I Know My Redeemer Liveth” to the program, just in case.) 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.”

Formally, Brahms’s selections comprise a focused, rounded arch. The first two movements address not the dead but living mourners. Where the traditional Latin Requiem opens with a plea for eternal rest for the souls of the departed, Brahms begins with one of the Beatitudes: “Blessed are they who carry sorrow, for they shall be comforted.” He continues with the assurance from Psalm 126 that “they who sow in tears will reap in joy.” The second movement expands these ideas. A passage from Peter reminds us that all flesh is like grass, and the glory of man is like a flower that withers. Brahms pairs this with a plea for patience, like the farmer who waits for the morning and evening rains to water the fruits of the earth. At the end of the second movement, sorrow again gives way to joy, now everlasting. In the third movement the perspective shifts 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.” Like the second movement, the third ends with a text of assurance. The fourth movement’s text, from Psalm 84, paints a picture of “lovely dwellings” and a state of blessedness. 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 opens with a passage from Hebrews for the chorus, portraying 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 arch: 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.

As noted above, Brahms avowed: “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. One such choice is that of key. The first and last movements are both in F major, balancing the arch. The second, third, and sixth movements all begin in a minor key and end in the major, underlining their texts’ transitions from sorrow and tears to comfort and joy. In other places, Brahms uses unrelated, distant keys to distinguish an important passage or an entire movement. The second movement opens in the flat-rich gloom of B-flat minor. During that movement’s “be patient” section, Brahms slides into the rare key of G-flat major. Following the extended pedal tone on low D that ends the third movement, the weightless E-flat major that opens the fourth movement sounds worlds away. Brahms manipulates form and proportion to emphasize the theme of assurance. 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 movements ends with a pedal tone on low D that flows unbroken for thirty-six measures while 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. With the exception of some parts of the fugues, there are few passages in which the orchestra merely doubles the choral parts. Brahms manipulates texture, register, and instrumentation to highlight the difference between dark and light, sorrow and comfort, and other dualities. The opening of the work swaddles the ear in the cashmere 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. Brahms introduces the inimitable sound of harps at “they who sow tears,” only to draw us to their jaunty triplets at “shall come with joy.” The altos’ solo delivery in the first movement of the full statement (“Blessed are they who mourn”) is crowned by a glowing halo of flutes, oboes, and solo horn, with no supporting accompaniment. Other statements smolder with the darker glow of doubling trombones. In the second movement, after the somber funeral march, Brahms crafts music of delicious lightness, gently sprinkling raindrops of flutes, harps, and pizzicato strings. At the end of the second movement, the choir sustains chords in the middle register on “everlasting joy” while the strings ascend, leading our ears upward to the radiance of the high woodwinds and then down the scale, to the lowest note in the bassoon. Nearly all of the movements end with a high chord sustained by the shimmer of woodwinds. In the third movement, Brahms uses orchestration to illuminate the baritone’s increasing desolation. When he repeats his opening lines (“Lord, let me know that I must have an end”) the sustained string support of his original statement is reduced to brittle pizzicato chords, with just the quiet tremor of timpani to connect the dots. The heart of the work—the fourth and fifth movements—stands apart from the rest. In the fourth, marked “with movement,” the fluid triple meter, nudged along by noodling eighth notes, combines with the high entry of the winds in counterpoint with singing cellos to feel like a dance—the gossamer petticoats of Viennese waltzers twirling weightlessly in an otherworldly ballroom, reveling in a state of blessedness. In the fifth movement, the 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. 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.

After the triumphant fugue at the end of the sixth movement, Brahms doesn’t ease into lighter, more heavenly music, but instead returns to the starchy orchestral textures of the first three movements. He purposefully connects the first movement and the last. Both open with the same word: “Blessed.” Both share the tonal center of F major. The declamatory alto melody that delivers the words “Blessed are they who mourn” in the first movement returns in the last (though down a tone) for “Blessed are the dead.” Thereafter, until the end, there are echoes of the first movement, with the woodwinds reprising melodic material directly. There are explicit motivic connections, too. The three-note motive with which the sopranos begin the entire work is outlined by the basses and cellos in the first three notes of the last movement, and at their entry, the sopranos sing the same pattern in inversion, a mirror image. The same motive turns up in other guises throughout the entire work.

On the large scale, 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 harmonic clay. The somber chant melody of the second movement rises just enough to feel like it’s getting somewhere, but then collapses on itself, withering like the blooms on the grass. Elsewhere, though, Brahms allows signs of hope: At the very end of the work the harps, silent since halfway through the second movement, dramatically re-enter, rolling from the bottom of their range to the top. Though fronted by the heaven-bound harps, the instrumentation here bears Brahms’s characteristic balanced registration: The woodwinds provide their customary high chord but 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 the lens of our current world context and tinted by our own emotional filters. In my first concert with Princeton Pro Musica, in 2012, we heard the shadowy strands that open Mozart’s Requiem thicken and swirl 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’s Requiem, it was impossible to ignore that our burgeoning global population 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. And we have all faced our own personal storms, including, inevitably, the loss of a loved one. Beyond the simple sensory pleasure of hearing beautiful sounds, we each experience music through our own particular lenses and filters. 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, 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 where it began, and in between offers music that can meet each of us wherever we happen to be. It gently resists frightening us with operatic depictions of medieval judgment or seducing us 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, and the transient withers while the everlasting abides.

Just before Brahms put pen to paper to create his masterpiece, an ocean away a melancholic but ultimately hopeful politician perfectly encapsulated what I, in 2017, heard 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.