The German Requiem is Brahms's largest single composition and a pivotal work in his own creative life. It bears little relation to the Messa da Requiem of Catholic liturgy. Less a requiem for the dead, it is more an act of consolation for the bereaved. Brahms told Karl Reinthaler, the choirmaster (and trained theologian) who helped prepare the work's premiere in Bremen in 1868: 'I could easily dispense with the word "German" and replace it with "Human".' Like Heinrich Schütz in his 1636 burial mass, Musikalische Exequien, Brahms sets German-language texts drawn from the Bible. Many are familiar from Protestant funeral rites used in Germany and elsewhere; the emphasis, however, is very much Brahms's own.
      Brahms was neither an atheist nor an agnostic. Dvořák's remark 'Such a great man and such a great soul, but he believes in nothing' is well wide of the mark. The need for faith was, in Brahms's view, a fact of the human condition. A late motet by him sets a text in which obedience to God's word is seen as the ground of faith and the basis for human happiness.
      Religious doctrine was another matter. Reinthaler was concerned that Brahms had knowingly ignored the words from St John's Gospel, 'For God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.' The twofold idea of Christ the Redeemer, and death as the gateway to eternal life for the righteous, is deliberately obscured by Brahms, who chooses instead the words 'Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth [my emphasis]'. Happily, there was no falling out over this: at the Good Friday premiere in Bremen Cathedral, Brahms acceded to Reinthaler's request that Handel's aria 'I know that my redeemer liveth' be included in the performance.
       Brahms's friend Robert Schumann had predicted that his young protégé would one day create choral works which would afford 'wondrous glimpses into the world of the spirit'. As a young man, Brahms systematically explored the substantial body of Renaissance and Baroque choral music lodged in the Hamburg City Library. Later, after Schumann's attempted suicide in 1854, he took charge of the composer's own extensive library of pre-Classical music. More than any great composer since Bach, Brahms rooted his art in old music and old ways of doing things. Over several years, he collected and catalogued hundreds of examples of that most taxing and diverting of musical devices, the canon. He also wrote them: not as dry technical exercises but as a conscious attempt to master the elements of a craft which had taken men such as Schütz, Palestrina, and Bach towards that greatest of all musical goals: the drawing of harmony and order out of dissonance and disjunction. From Schütz and Bach, he also learned how to incorporate dance- and speech-rhythms into his music, as well as valuable lessons about word-painting and the expressive use of dissonance.
      Brahms began his spiritual journey in music in 1856 with his 'Geistliches Lied', a sacred 'choral song' which enjoins calm of mind even in the face of grief. However, it was a motet begun the following year, 'Schaffe in mir, Gott, ein rein Herz', which alerted Schumann's widow, Clara, to the fact that academic study was bearing musical and spiritual fruit.
      Some of the music used in the German Requiem can be traced back to 1854, when Brahms launched an ambitious plan to write a four-movement symphony in D minor. This eventually became his First Piano Concerto, though he also set aside certain material, including a slow Scherzo in the form of a sarabande. The basis of the second-movement funeral march in the German Requiem ('For all flesh is as grass'), the sarabande was first used in 1858 in Brahms's seven-movement, seven-minute Begräbnisgesang ('Burial Song'), a graveside anthem of rare concentration and intensity scored for mixed chorus and wind band. Schumann's death, and the grief of his widow, may have been the inspiration behind the piece.
      Though Brahms himself never spoke of the matter, the cue for the writing of a fully-fledged German Requiem was the death of his mother, Christine Brahms, in 1865. She had suffered a stroke in January of that year. Brahms travelled to see her but she died, aged 76, before he arrived. In April, he started work on the Requiem, beginning with two four-part choruses: 'How amiable are Thy tabernacles' and 'Blessed are they that mourn', the work's opening number, thought by Brahms, in retrospect, to be its weakest.
      The Requiem, in its original six-movement form, was received with acclaim at the Bremen premiere two years later. The Handel insertion was not, needless to say, handed down to subsequent performances. Instead, Brahms added a seventh movement, the exquisite soprano aria 'Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit', the one movement which makes explicit reference to a mother's comfort. It is a difficult piece to perform: 'the tessitura so high, the emotion so deep', as Elisabeth Schwarzkopf memorably put it.
      The finished Requiem takes the shape of an arch. The fourth movement, 'How amiable are Thy tabernacles', is its apex. This is flanked by two movements in which the soloists, as it were, 'teach': the baritone in the third ['Every man walketh in a vain shew'), the soprano in the fifth. These are flanked in turn by the two longest movements, the work's doctrinal core, in which we are bidden to contemplate mortality ('For all flesh is as grass') and the hope of Resurrection ('O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?'). The opening and closing choruses which preface and follow these awe-inspiring outpourings are essentially meditative in tone. Both begin with the word 'selig' ('blessed') and both are in the key of F, though the last chorus approaches the final resolution via E flat: an upwards movement from dark to light which recurs throughout the work.
      The achievement of the German Requiem, its musical and dramatic reach, helped point the way forward to Brahms's most cherished goal: the fashioning of a long-awaited first symphony. He nonetheless continued to write sacred music until the end of his life. Indeed, the late flowering of the ancient German Protestant Motet might be regarded as one of his most singular achievements.
© Richard Osborne, 2007