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Johannes Brahms: German Requiem
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Johannes Brahms’ ”A German Requiem”, written between 1859 and 1867 is a masterpiece moulded by the composer’s own experience of life and mourning. It stands as testimony to the profundity of the young Brahms and his belief in God the everlasting. Rather than writing a „Missa pro defunctis”, a requiem in which „the souls of the dead are prayed for” - he selected passages from both the Old and New Testaments which would comfort „the people who are suffering”. The first performance of the complete composition took place on 18 February 1869 in the Leipzig Gewandhaus.
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The Star Trek: Original Series episode 'Requiem for Methuselah' indicated that Johannes Brahms was one of many aliases to an immortal man named 'Flint', born in the year 3834 BC. Brahms's expert music ability was said to be the result of centuries of artisic study and an unknown waltz by Brahms was played during the episode, written in modern times. The character of Flint / Brahms was played by actor James Daly.
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It is into this latter category that Johannes Brahms belongs, yet an important part of his output remains little known, even amongst enthusiasts for his art. This is his choral music, which comprises a significant proportion of his work, and which is mainly known through three works - Ein deutsches Requiem, the Alto Rhapsody and the first set of Liebeslieder Walzer. In many ways, this is a surprising state of affairs, for Brahms was enamoured of the voice throughout his life, and he wrote many vocal works - from solo songs to large-scale choral-orchestral pieces. Within this output, there is an imposing body of music by him for unaccompanied voices, and this album contains a representative selection drawn from the relatively familiar to the very rarely-heard.
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In the year of Bruno Walter Schlesinger's birth (1876), Johannes Brahms had already published his German Requiem and was currently completing his first symphony. The lives of these two musical giants would overlap for another twenty years.
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Today Johannes Brahms is best remembered for the symphonies he composed, but did you know that in his lifetime, his most famous pieces were German folk songs? Did you know that the great composer of the Romantic Period was quite the romantic himself, falling in love with his best friend's wife? Did you know that historians draw a direct link between Brahms' death and the death of the woman he loved? These are the lesser known facts about the well known musician.
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This work, completed in 1868, was the breakthrough piece in which Johannes Brahms, the young piano lion, created a large-scale orchestral-and-choral work and moved into his artistic maturity. The work was long and painful in its genesis, being inspired initially in 1865 by his mother's death, and moved forward by his friend Robert Schumann's attempted suicide. At least one movement was discarded, and recycled in the first piano concerto, and the soprano-solo movement was added in 1868 to help balance gloom with tenderness. The product is Brahms's longest single work, and a masterful summary of all the curious contradictions at work in Brahms's mind. It is deeply religious, offering solace to the bereaved with texts from the Bible, and painting a series of dramatic pictures, from the beauty of the Lord's dwelling place to man's insignificance before God, to man's redemption by faith. But at the same time, it is a humanist, secular work: Brahms chose texts from the Bible, rather than traditional liturgical chant, and used his vernacular German, rather than Latin.
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German Requiem