Johannes Brahms: A German Requiem

»FUNERAL MUSIC AS PRAISE OF THE MOURNING«

The sound form heard here reconstructs the original form of Johannes Brahms' German Requiem before its triumph in choral symphonic sound power. This arrangement comes from the composer Heinrich Poos (born in 1928), who mainly made his mark with vocal music and was a professor of music theory in Berlin for many years. Poos allows us a glimpse into Johannes Brahms' musical workshop and the working process of the German Requiem by dividing the orchestral part between two pianos and adding the timpani as essential orchestral drivers.

The workshop character of this arrangement is historically and acoustically authenticated by the instruments used: both grand pianos are original instruments from the WDR's large pool, one an Erard grand piano, built in Paris in 1839, the other a Collard grand piano from London from 1849. Also the timpani are historical instruments, made and used during Brahms' lifetime.

This sound version is at the same time a journey through time to the creation of the Requiem: Johannes Brahms not only wrote the piano reduction and a four-hand arrangement of the orchestral score himself, but the piano was also the starting point and tonal primordial cell of the composition. The pianist Brahms had already conceived a (later discarded) sonata for two pianos in the mid-1850s. Their slow scherzo, a sarabande as a funeral march in triple time, found its way into the German Requiem as its second movement, the choral piece »For all flesh, it is like grass« in the character »slow, march-like«.

The procedure and character of a Latin requiem mass are strictly ritualized in the Catholic liturgy. In contrast to this, the Protestant Brahms himself selected and compiled the texts of his Requiem from the Old and New Testaments “according to the words of the Holy Scriptures”. Brahms was an eminent authority on the Bible; as a typical Wilhelminian-North German cultural Protestant of the late 19th century, he maintained his distance from the church and all dogmatics.

Brahms' friend Rudolf von der Leyen writes in his memoirs: »On one occasion we spoke about Robert Schumann, Brahms' greatest and best-loved friend, about the sad time of his illness inendenich. Brahms told me that Schumann asked for the Bible and that his doctors took this request as a new symptom of his mental illness and initially refused it. People just didn't know, said Brahms, that we North Germans yearn for the Bible every day and never let a day go by without it. In my study, even in the dark, I grab my Bible right away!«

For Brahms, the focus of his personal expression of faith is not on the dead with their commemoration and the prayer for eternal rest, but rather he composed his "funeral music as a beatitude of the mourners", as he wrote to his friend Karl Reinthaler, who, as Bremen Cathedral organist, was a participant in the first performance there on Good Friday 1868.

And to the concerns of the studied theologian Reinthaler ("But for the Christian consciousness, the point around which everything revolves is missing, namely the redeeming death of the Lord.") the composer replies: "As far as the text is concerned, I want to confess that I I would also be happy to leave out the 'German' and simply put 'Menschen' ... «. Brahms is not concerned with a theologically secure and Christian tradition of depicting death as redemption and transcendence, or with the admonishing and thoroughly threatening images of the Last Judgment contained in the Latin Requiem. Rather, Brahms' concern is a comforting message to the bereaved, in an individual perspective of unrestricted humanity and beyond all restrictions of denomination and language.

The universal validity of Johannes Brahms' musical and spiritual concern lies in its understandable credibility, because the consolation of the soul that the Requiem conveys arises from his own spiritual distress: Brahms is homeless, geographically and emotionally. At the time he was composing the Requiem he was constantly travelling, no longer at home in his native city of Hamburg (where he had been refused the post he had hoped for as music director) and not yet settled in Vienna (where he, a wealthy man, later lived until his Death should live as a subtenant).

The self-chosen lack of commitment also extended to the most private sphere: the fact that Brahms, the woman friend, thought he was unfit for marriage was probably due to fear for his productivity, which he believed to be endangered in bourgeois, orderly relationships. And when Brahms laments in the Requiem »Because we have no permanent place here« and musically transfigured sings »How lovely are your apartments, Herr Zebaoth!«, this is the compensation for a state of homelessness, as Brahms communicated to Clara Schumann in the deepest distress of his soul describes: "I'm not a cosmopolitan, I'm attached to my hometown like a mother. […] How seldom is there a lasting place for us, how much I would have liked to have found it in my hometown. [...] You have seen from your husband and you know it at all that they prefer to let us go completely and let us fly around alone in the empty world. And yet one would like to be tied down and acquire what life makes life, and is afraid of loneliness.” This is precisely what makes the German Requiem one of Brahms' most heartfelt works: Brahms also begs for consolation for himself, because he is himself one of those "who are suffering".

Michael Schwalb