New Millennium Strings
Concerts | Musicians | Rehearsals | Supporters | Board | Contact Us
Johannes Brahms
A German Requiem
Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg in 1833 and died in Vienna in 1897. It seems that everyone who reads about Johannes Brahms is intrigued about his personal and musical life. The composer was born to a poor family. His mother was a seamstress and his father played the double bass. Since Brahms showed promising musical talent at a young age, he was given piano lessons. Soon Brahms was able to bring extra income to the family by playing the piano at bars, restaurants, and brothels. By 1853 he met and began concertizing with the Hungarian violinist Remenyi. During the same year, Brahms also toured with the highly acclaimed violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim. As a result of making these musical contacts, Brahms then met Franz Lizst and Robert and Clara Schumann. The young pianist/composer found himself in the middle of a highly acclaimed musical circle.
Robert and especially Clara Schumann proved to be Brahms' lifelong musical friends and colleagues. While Robert began his long descent to insanity, he focused on creating his compositional masterpieces upon masterpieces. Brahms was always a present and stalwart friend for both Robert and Clara through all their family struggles. After her husband died, Clara decided to pursue her career as a concert pianist. Most of her close friends anticipated that Brahms and Clara would now be free to marry, but she decided not to foist the responsibility of her seven children on a new husband.
Throughout his life, Brahms treasured Clara's close friendship and musical collaborations. Her expertise both as a pianist and as a composer was invaluable to Brahms. Most people speculated that their devoted 40-year relationship was more than just platonic. In a letter dated June, 1854, Brahms writes to Joachim about Clara:
"I believe that I do not have more concern and admiration for her than that I love her and am under her spell. I often must restrain myself forcibly from just quietly putting my arms around her and even, I do not know, it seems to me so natural that she could not misunderstand. I think I can no longer love an unmarried girl, at least, I have quite forgotten about them. They but promise heaven while Clara shows it revealed to me."
Many personal critics of Brahms have viewed him both as rude and as an eccentric. The truth was, his personality revealed that he was overwhelmingly shy. He always remained modest about his talents. A portion of a conversation between the singer George Henschel and Brahms expresses the composer's humilty about his own works:
"I am not ashamed to own that it gives me the keenest pleasure if a song, an adagio, or anything of mine, has turned out particularly good. How must those gods Bach, Mozart, Beethoven have felt, whose daily bread it was to write things like the St. Matthew Passion, Don Giovanni, Fidelio, Ninth Symphony! What I cannot understand is how people like myself can be vain. As much as we men, who walk upright, are above the creeping things of the earth, so these gods are above us. If it were not so ludicrous it would be loathsome to me to hear colleagues praise me to my face in such an exaggerated manner."
The completed version of Ein Deutsches Requiem, as heard at these concerts, was first performed in Leipzig on February 18, 1869, with Carl Reinecke conducting. In 1854 Brahms had not set out to compose a large choral piece, but instead he concentrated on his Symphony in D Minor. Althought this Symphony did not come to fruition, some of its thematic material appeared in the Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 15, in D Minor. Brahms borrowed thematic material from his Piano Concerto No. 1 that later became the opening theme for the second movement of the Requiem.
Brahms had intended that this melodic material would be a portion of a four-movement cantata, but because of his extensive concertizing, the work stalled. While grieving over his mother's death in 1865, he focused his creative energies on composing the first, second, and fourth movements of the Requiem. By August 1866 the work lacked only the fifth movement, which was finished by 1869. The completed Requiem performed in Leipzig was an overwhelming success and it was heard in Germany twenty times during that same year.
A German Requiem was viewed as a work that could have been entitled "A Human Requiem." Brahms intended that the work should attempt to capture a universal human experience, and he wanted to address the living instead of the dead. He chose Luther's translation of the Bible and provided text from both the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha. He purposefully avoided any references to the works "Jesus" or "Christ" in order that the text would not follow any particular liturgy. Brahms felt that since the original text was written in German, that was as good a reason as any to entitle the work Ein Deutsches Requiem.
In the first movement the instrumentation emphasizes a dark timbre. In this movement there are no violins, piccolo, or clarinets. The passage begins with a heartbeat cello/bass motif, and then Brahms makes use of full divisi writing in the viola and cello. The sopranos enter by singing an ascending interval of a third followed by an interval of a second. The triplet rhythm heard in the harp is then used to emphasize the text when tears turn to joy.
The second movement begins as a funeral march in 3/4 meter. The muted violins play a rhythmic theme in an upper register, but they retain a subdued quality as a result of using the mute. When the chorus enters, they sing in unison, while the timpani plays continuous and foreboding triplets. This is the thematic material that was removed from Brahms' incomplete Symphony in D Minor. A cheerful moment is illustrated harmonically in a major key. The text is about "patience." The depiction of "the early rain" is heard in the flute and harp in eighth notes. Towards the end, the funeral march returns, and the movement concludes with an energetic chorus singing "The Ransomed of the Lord." The ending dies away like a giant sigh illustrated by descending scales in the strings.
The third movement begins with the barione recitative and climaxes with a double fugue. One fugal subject appears in the orchestra and the other subject appears in the chorus. In the fourth movement, the voices sing a tranquil, expressive line over a shimmering and undulating eighth note figure played by the strings. The fifth movement was the last movement to be added to make the Requiem complete. It features a transparent and expressive soprano solo, which is accompanied at the beginning with pizzicato in the strings. The text speaks of maternal consolation.
The sixth movement employs the baritone solo singing about the "mysteries to come." Suddenly the instrumentation gains full force and the strings push through a vigorous passage with driving eighth notes. The athletic brass writing is also reminiscent of both the Verdi and Berlioz Requiems. The brass underpin the text: "O death, where is thy sting?" The memorable C major fugue concludes the sixth movement.
The last movement is similar in text and orchestration to the first movement. It begins with a smooth and full string sound complete in this movement with slurred and coupleted eighth notes. The movement concludes on the word "blessed," while the arpeggiated harp figure concludes the last cadence.
-- program notes by Laurien Jones