Ein deutsches Requiem | Johannes Brahms | NEOS – your online music store for contemporary music and special classics

FUNERAL MUSIC AS BEATITUDES FOR THE BEREAVED

The sounds reproduced here represent a reconstruction of the original form that Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem) by Johannes Brahms took before its triumphal march through the symphonic choral literature. The score was reworked by the composer Heinrich Poos (born in 1928), who is mainly known for his vocal music and who was Professor of Music Theory in Berlin for many years.

By distributing the orchestral music between two pianos and adding timpani that function as a kind of orchestral pulse, Poos allows us a glimpse into the compositional workshop of Johannes Brahms and helps us understand the working processes that led to the German Requiem. The workshop nature of this arrangement is an authentic one, both historically and in terms of instrumentation: the pianos used are original instruments from the considerable collection belonging to the West German Radio (WDR). The Erard grand was built in 1839 in Paris; the Collard grand dates from 1849 and has a London provenance. The kettle drums are historical instruments, too, manufactured and played during Brahms’ own lifetime.

This version of the Requiem is a kind of time travel – we return to the very roots of the work. Brahms not only made a piano reduction of the orchestral score, but an arrangement for four hands, too. And the piano remains the musical point of departure as well as the compositional cell of the work. The pianist Brahms was, by the middle of the 1850s, already working on a sonata for two pianos, but later discarded the materials. The slow scherzo – a sarabande cast as a funeral march in a steady triple metre – was to end up as the second movement of the German Requiem, the tune setting the words “Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras” (For all flesh is grass). It is marked “langsam, marschmäßig” (slow, like a march).

The order and character of the Latin Mass for the Dead in the Catholic liturgy are strongly ritualistic. But the Protestant Brahms did not latch on to this tradition, choosing to add to his Requiem texts taken from the “words from the Holy Scriptures”, the composer drawing from both the Old and New Testaments as sources. Brahms shared a deep knowledge of the Bible; as a typical late 19th century, Wilhelminian, North German protestant with cultural leanings, he maintained a distance from the church and any concomitant dogmatism.

An acquaintance of the composer, Rudolf von der Leyen, writes in his memoirs: “We spoke on one occasion about Robert Schumann, Brahms’ greatest and most revered friend, discussing the sad days he spent in very poor health in Endenich. Brahms told me how Schumann asked for a copy of the Bible and how his doctors had interpreted this request as yet another symptom of his deteriorating mental state. Nobody realises that as North Germans it is considered quite normal to dip into the scriptures on a daily basis. In my study, I often reach out my hand in the dark and always end up with the Bible in my hand!”

Central to Brahms’ personal expression of belief are not the dead and the attendant thoughts of supplication for eternal rest, but a “kind of funeral music written for the beatification of the suffering”, as he expressed it in a letter to his friend Karl Reinthaler, who as the Cathedral Organist in Bremen was one of the performers at the premiere there on Good Friday 1868. As for the personal thoughts of Reinthaler, a qualified theologian, he felt: “What is missing however is a sense of awareness for the central belief of Christianity itself, upon which everything hangs, namely salvation through the death of God’s own son.”

Brahms retorted: “In terms of the text, I wish to make clear that I would prefer to leave out the ‘German’ and simply replace it with ‘human’.” The manner in which death as a means of salvation is represented in the work demonstrates that Brahms was neither occupied with sound theological arguments secured by way of Christian tradition nor the warnings and threatening graphic images of an impending final judgement. Brahms is much more concerned with imparting a soothing message to those left behind, and seeks to convey an individual position that deals with humanity as a whole and which goes beyond all the constraints of confessions and language.

The general validity of the musical and spiritual concerns of Johannes Brahms is made plausible in that it is demonstrable. And the wish to comfort the soul converted by the Requiem arises out of a personal sense of spiritual distress: Brahms remains destitute, both geographically and at heart. At the time the Requiem was composed he was constantly travelling. He was not at home in his birthplace Hamburg (where he was refused the hoped-for position as Music Director), and had not yet settled in Vienna (where, despite his favourable financial position, he was to live in rented property until his death).

This refusal to be tied to a particular mode of living was one he chose himself; it permeated the most intimate areas of his life. Although Brahms enjoyed female company, he believed he was not suited to marriage. He probably feared it would interfere with his productivity, which in cosy societal surroundings he felt would be endangered. Even when Brahms remonstrates in the Requiem that we are “not of this world”, and sings of the “many houses” in heaven, this must be seen as merely a compensation for a condition felt by the composer.

He felt not to be at home anyway on earth, writing in pure desperation to Clara Schumann: “I am not a cosmopolitan, and feel like I am still tied to the apron strings of town in which I was born … How seldom it is that people like us find somewhere to remain which we can really call home … You experienced this with your own husband and know just how it is to want to let go of everything and roam around an empty world. And yet one still wishes to be tied down and find out just how life can engender life, we become easily frightened of loneliness.” And this is what makes the German Requiem one of Brahms’ most profound and intimate works. The sense of comfort – and how Brahms claims it for himself, too – is palpable. For he is also “one of the suffering”.

Michael Schwalb