Selig sind die Toten – solace from blessed past labours in Ein deutsches Requiem

Mention the word ‘requiem’ and the first words that spring to mind are likely to be judgement, dread, terror and, perhaps, the possibility of salvation. The Requiems of Mozart, Berlioz and Verdi definitely play on those religious connotations. Very noticeably, Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem does not. In its sixth movement, despite drawing on a similar text from Corinthians that Verdi and others used for Tuba Mirum, the sound of the trumpet (or trombone if you’re German) is not a reason to be fearful but heralds a transformation. At this moment there is an abrupt change of key, texture, timbre and dynamics to declare triumphantly that death, specifically the fear of death, can be defeated. At the work’s climax, chorus and orchestra ratchet up the tension at the words Der Tod ist verschlungen in den Sieg. Tod, wo ist dein Stachel? Hölle, wo ist dein Sieg? (Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave – Hell being too strong for Victorian translators’ sensibilities – where is thy victory)? Brahms could have ended Ein deutsches Requiem on that high. Instead there is a ruminative closing movement that brings the work full circle, back to the consoling word selig – blessed. This is a requiem about solace, not judgement, solace being what we seek when people we know and love die, when longing is unfulfilled. Solace is not an escape but a strategy for coping, for enduring painful memories. Above all, as David Whyte wrote: how will you shape a life equal to and as beautiful and as astonishing as world that can birth you, bring you into the light, and then, just as you are beginning to understand it, take you away? ¹

Brahms was notoriously secretive: even his closest friends declared themselves at a loss to know what he was really thinking at any given moment. In the matter of religious belief, for example, there are some who will say he was definitely agnostic while others maintain he was a believer, albeit not in an orthodox manner. He received traditional Lutheran instruction and studied The Bible in depth, valuing it not as revealing the Word of Good but as enshrining something central to his German cultural identity. The choice of words and the beautiful, often astonishing, shape given to them by Brahms in the music of his German Requiem, creates an emotional narrative that is comparable in performance to the Bach Passions. Composers were at the core of that identity and the legacy of Bach, and other German composers, pervades the German Requiem. But before looking at who, what and how, there is a when to promote.

In a few weeks time, three choirs who have never all sung together before will assemble in Romsey Abbey with a youth orchestra, who may never have played with a chorus before, to perform this evergreen, choral classic. The excitement and anticipation of such musical events that draw on irregular associations is, of course, one reason why most of us keep coming back for more. It will be the job of the conductor, Adam Broughton, to ensure that the Winchester Youth Orchestra, Southampton Choral Society, Conchord Singers and Portsmouth Baroque Choir, plus baritone and soprano soloists, reach a shared understanding of how this evergreen favourite will sound on the night. As individual singers, however, we can do more than come in at the right time, render the notes in the score correctly and do a decent job of pronouncing the German text, which are in themselves not trivial undertakings. Brahms wrote the Requiem with amateurs in mind but was in no doubt about the high level of competence required, vocal stamina maintained across sixty-five to eighty minutes being its toughest demand. Each of the performers brings their own experience, their musical hinterland, that quite likely includes a previous encounter with the Requiem. This ingredient can be just as important as vocal ability to a successful performance.

My own engagement with this fabulous piece goes back over fifty years to my time as a music student. Ein deutsches Requiem was one of the many Brahms scores I tried to dissect for my undergraduate dissertation. Eager to expand on Schoenberg’s idea that thematic processes in Brahms were one of the paths to serialism, I spent months annotating my miniature score, doubtless uncovering many connections that were far-fetched or not there at all, at least not intentionally. At that time I was unaware that Brahms had once reprimanded Adolf Schulbring, a critic and admirer, for making so bold as to lay out in detail the many internal motivic connections in the Requiem and the external examiner at my viva voce, an ardent Wagnerian, took a similar view. A decade later, as a tenor with the BBC Symphony Chorus, I sang the Requiem three times, one of which was a recording for EMI with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus followed by a BBC Prom. These last two performances, in August 1984, were conducted by Klaus Tennstedt: both the CD (with soloists Jorma Hynninen and Jessye Norman) and the Prom recording (with soloists Thomas Allen and Lucia Popp) can be found on Youtube. Tennstedt was most famous for his Mahler but he had a special affinity for the Requiem. He was not in good health in 1984 and a year later was diagnosed with cancer, which forced him to retire early from his LPO position. The tempi he adopted for each of the movements, especially the first, were incredibly slow – crotchet = 52: most conductors, even Klemperer, have opted for 65 or 66. Those recordings are still the longest duration of any. You might think that they would sound laboured but instead every ounce of emotion was wrung from each phrase and the magic Tennstedt conjured up through facial gestures in the opening bars, as if on a direct line to Brahms himself, continue to haunt me. Brahms provided metronome marks initially but removed them, convinced that the circumstances of any given performance should dictate the most appropriate tempo within a prescribed framework, such as Ziemlich langsam und mit Ausdruck/ Quite slowly and with expression. Tennstedt’s very slow tempi were a good choice for the spacious Studio 1 at Abbey Road and for a packed Royal Albert Hall.

Since then, although I’ve occasionally played Brahms’s clarinet works and worked through the late piano pieces, I can’t remember even hearing the Requiem again until Portsmouth Baroque Choir started rehearsing it earlier this year. It’s been a joy and a thrill and has led me to consider once again why the music of Brahms, and this work in particular, has such transcendental power and how an appreciation of what produces that power might inform and enhance performance.

Brahms scholarship has also moved on during that forty-year hiatus. In an age when almost every known piece of music can be heard live somewhere on the planet or is available on multiple recordings with a couple of clicks on an electronic device, it is difficult to comprehend how little was known in the middle of the 19th century about older music. Involvement with an increasingly wide range of previously unknown or little-known music from the past, often at the expense of contemporary music, characterises the musical world of the later 20th century and shows no signs of diminishing as we enter the second quarter of the 21st. To this trend, Brahms as scholar and performer (conductor especially) made a significant contribution and this is acknowledged increasingly in the way Brahms’s music is being programmed and recorded in our times. Hugh Wood, writing the sleeve notes in 2011 for John Eliot Gardiner’s recording of the Requiem, stresses the importance of understanding Brahms as a scholar, right from his teenage years. After Schumann’s death, Brahms had full access to and helped organise his extensive library; Clara Schumann gifted Brahms the first volume of the emerging complete edition of Bach; he spent hours in libraries and second-hand book shops and at some stage he came into possession of Carl von Winterfeld’s 3-volume work Giovanni Gabrieli and his times (1834), the third volume of which contained music examples by names barely known at that time – Gabrieli, Monteverdi, Marenzio, Lassus and, most significantly, Schütz.

Other works will be performed in the first half of the Romsey Abbey programme, sung separately by the three participating choirs. Portsmouth Baroque Choir will sing Schütz’s motet Selig sind die Toten SWV 391, the very same text that Brahms made use of in the final movement of the Requiem. Brahms admired Schütz and understood his importance for the early development, via his Venetian influences, of the Austro-German musical language extending roughly from 1650 to 1900. SWV 391 is a magnificent setting and has a rich, Brahmsian feel to it, particularly at the words sie ruhen von ihre Arbeit. Movement IV, Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen ² which occurs like a pivotal motet within the Requiem (and which was one of the first parts to be completed) also has a Schütz precursor, SWV 29 for double choir. Brahms is believed to have owned a copy of Schütz’s Musikalische Exiquien, funeral music written for Prince Heinrich Posthumus von Reuss (1572-1635) who chose (possibly with some assistance from Schütz) texts from Scripture as well as Lutheran chorales. The compilation of texts and the musical structures applied by Schütz created something completely new and there are clear resemblances to the shape and form of the Brahms, not to mention the central message about dealing with death and hopes reaching beyond the grave. ³

For his first concert as musical director of the Vienna Singakademie in 1863, Brahms programmed Beethoven’s Opferlied. Schumann’s Requiem für Mignon, three Isaac arrangements and the first Viennese performance of Bach’s cantata Ich hatte viel Bekümneris (I had much grief) BWV 21. While most of the writing of Ein deutsches Requiem occurred years later, between 1865 and 1868, ideas had been germinating for a lot longer and two of the works in that Vienna programme, the Schumann and the Bach, were especially important in that regard. Brahms was touchy when people said that such and such a phrase or melody of his sounded like somebody else’s. Brahms was not interested in revealing the workings of his subconscious musical mind although he did appreciate praise for when it was deliberately crafted. One revelation he did vouchsafe was that a well-known chorale tune underpinned the entire Requiem. This is generally thought to be Wer nur den lieben Gott läßt walden (He who only lets God rule) the modal chorale tune used by Bach in BWV 21. For its Viennese première, Brahms also prepared the continuo part. It is one of Bach’s best cantatas, intensely moving in its obsessive use of the key of C minor to represent longing, sadness and solemnity. The opening shape of that chorale tune appears at various points in the Requiem, most obviously in movement II for the unison choral melody Wenn alles fleisch, but its shape can even be detected at the very beginning. ⁴

Bach’s Cantata 27, Wer weiß, wie nahe mein Ende? (Who knows how near to me my end?) is also a likely reference where the same chorale tune is used for the opening number and where the final chorus sounds, to me, very like the choral writing of Brahms. Rudolf Lutz and the J S Bach Stiftung have endeavoured to make the relationship explicit by pairing both works on their live recording made in 2024 during their With Bach and Brahms tour. ⁵ Cantatas 4 (for Easter) Christ lag in Todes Banden and Actus Tragicus BWV 106, which can be interpreted as a Protestant requiem that depicts the process of dying through words from the Scripture, are also mentioned by scholars as having a connection with the Requiem. 

The text of Cantata 27 recounts the resurrection of Lazarus by Jesus. Coincidentally, also in 1863, Brahms was at work editing and copying out parts of Schubert’s unfinished Easter cantata Lazarus, a work he considered a masterpiece. Commentators have suggested that as a through-composed music drama it prefigures Parsifal while its solemn simplicity and diatonic radiance resemble Gluck and, in turn, influence some of the music in the Requiem. Brahms had a lifelong love for the music of Schubert but its lyricism becomes a more noticeable characteristic of Brahms’s own music after 1863. In 1865 he arranged the piano part of the vocal score of Schubert’s Mass in E flat and the opening of the Requiem does resemble that of the Mass.

These activities – the scholarship and historically informed performance – mixed potently with Brahms the composer: he was one of the first to work in an historically aware, academic fashion. This results, unfortunately, in Brahms often being thought a conservative, old-fashioned in sound and methodology: Brahms the traditionalist, as opposed to Liszt and Wagner the futurists. There is a depth and timelessness about Brahms that tone poems and programme music, for all their momentary excitement, lack. It is significant that Brahms never once programmed any Berlioz or Liszt in his concerts, and deplored the young lion, Richard Strauss. Neither should we think that it was only the shadow of Beethoven that haunted Brahms, supposedly impeding his symphonic writing. The list of composers edited by Brahms is impressive: Couperin, W.F. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, Chopin, Schubert’s symphonies and Mozart’s Requiem – not to mention conducting choirs in Detmold and orchestras in Vienna – made it abundantly clear that if he was destined to extend such a line of excellence, he had better measure up. He had a strong conviction that something very special had been evolving in Austro-German music up until the mid-19th century: it needed cherishing and nurturing as there was also the real possibility, keenly felt, that it might be coming to an end. Brahms made a point of destroying anything that did not come up to the mark and his published compositions often took years to emerge, typically from ideas that he carried around in his extraordinary memory rather than as sketches. So, given that Ein deutsches Requiem that took ten years to complete, it is not surprising that it contains so many flavours from German music history.

One senses this historical gravitas right from the opening bar’s pulsing low F in the cellos and basses. Horns join in then some of the cellos trace a chromatic descent, a weeping figure is skilfully “woven through the movement that follows, recurring in a ritualistic, Neo-Baroque manner”. ⁶ It is especially strong in the penultimate movement VI. Between the last bar of V and the first of VI there is an exchange of G major chords, but the new tonality will not be G major, nor as the key signature states – C minor – and indeed that key is only brushed in passing at the end of bar 3 before being established when the movement reaches  Denn es wird die Posaune schallen (for the trumpet shall sound) fifty bars later at the change of tempo from Andante to Vivace. In between the music has modulated to F sharp minor (Siehe, ich sage euch ein Geheimnis / Behold, I show you a mystery) and we are indeed in a mysterious, ambiguous space where the text points forward – Denn wir haben hie kein bleibende Statt, sondern die zukünftige suchen wir (For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come) while the music harks back to an older sound world of modality and polyphonic part writing. The chorus opens with homorhythmic phrases and imitative counterpoint over a walking bass line: it is as if Schütz, Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven have all been summoned. Even the notation of this movement looks antique, especially in the Allegro fugue Herr, du bist würdig with its Handelian repetitions of Preis und Ehre und Kraft: …the plethora of half, whole, and even double whole notes (all those white notes!) is not the norm for nineteenth-century choral music, but was the default modern rendition (in the nineteenth century) of the white mensural notation used for Renaissance music.  Brahms would have been well acquainted with this convention. ⁷

You might say, well, doesn’t that make this work something of a nostalgic potpourri? The weight of musical history in the work is something you sense without it being obvious and that, I think, is the key to its greatness and one of several reasons for its instant success following the Good Friday 1868 première in Bremen Cathedral. ⁸

It certainly made a great impression on Clara Schumann: The Requiem has taken hold of me as no other sacred music ever did before… It was a joy such as I have not felt for a long time, wrote Clara to Brahms. She was guest of honour at the première and Brahms made a point of accompanying her to her seat: Just before the performance Brahms took Clara’s arm at the door of the cathedral and escorted her up the nave. Many of the hundreds watching knew something of what had passed between them. There was almost an air of a marriage ceremony about that moment, there walk down the aisle arm in arm that ended not with ring and vows, but with the consecration of music. ⁹

Also in the audience, estimated at 2500 strong, was Brahms’s father, the composer Max Bruch, the brothers Grimm and publisher Rieter-Biedermann. A chorus of two-hundred singers, including four veterans from Brahms’s Hamburg Frauenchor, had been rehearsing the work for three months with Karl Reinthaler, who deemed it “epoch-making”. By all accounts, there were few dry eyes in Bremen Cathedral as the performance drew to a close. The Requiem was not the only work in the programme. Three pieces by Bach, Tartini and Schumann arranged for violin and organ were inserted between movements III and IV and after the final movement there were excerpts from Bach’s St Matthew Passion and Handel’s Messiah, ending with the Hallelujah chorus, pieces that might be expected in a gala concert such as this but also included to appease the church authorities on account of Brahms failing to mention Christ by name and omitting any prospect of paradise in the Requiem. ¹⁰ This was always intended to be a requiem for use, like the Mozart, in concerts, never in a liturgical setting,

The German Requiem quickly “took hold”, not just of Clara Schumann, and found success to a degree that very few works and composers have ever achieved in middle age: at the time of the première Brahms was still a month short of his 35th birthday. Reinthaler conducted the work again in Bremen a few weeks later and it was done twenty times across Germany in the following year. At a time when there were enthusiastic and competent choral groups across Europe, it spread rapidly to Russia, England and France. ¹¹ It was a watershed moment for Brahms, placing him and his new work on a pedestal where they have remained ever since. There are hundreds of recordings, four new ones released in the first quarter of this year alone. If this is consoling music for tough times, then now can be counted one of them. Its religious message is in no way exclusive dealing with existential questions that speak as eloquently to those who do not espouse a traditional religion as to those who do. At the closing calm of the word selig (blessed) one is left wondering if the bond between people and God has been irrevocably broken: no prospect of an afterlife except for the remembrance of a life’s work. Brahms, through this text, is speaking for all humanity after life’s end. ¹² As Brahms himself said: Concerning the title, I would willingly replace “German” with “Human”.

Given the work’s success, one might have expected Brahms to capitalise and write an oratorio or two. There were a few other choral pieces to follow –Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny), Gesang der Parzen and Nänie but Ein deutsches Requiem stands alone in Brahms’s output in terms of length and scope. It can be regarded as a one-off summation of Brahms the composer and musical academic working in mid career, suffused with the history and sound world of German sacred music, a moving and personal statement about death:

At the end of his Requiem the dead are not reborn but released: “they rest from their labours.” It is that rest from his own lonely labours that Brahms yearned for someday, as his mother rested from her life of poverty and toil.  The central message of Ein deutsches Requiem is in its first lines: “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Brahms wrote his Requiem to bless those left living in the world, not the dead. The work aspires to comfort those who mourn. And it has done that through generations since it was first sung in Bremen. ¹³

 

I’ll close by wishing everyone a successful, consoling concert starting at 7:30 pm on May 10th in Romsey Abbey. Tickets have been selling fast.

Post-script (July 31 2025). Romsey Abbey was full and the applause was generous for a performance well-made. Almost three months later I came across an illustrated talk about the German Requiem by Simon Rattle, the second of a series entitled ‘Discover Music’ on Youtube that he is creating together with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and, in this instance, its wonderful chorus. As always, one wishes such wisdom as this could have been available earlier!