This morning I attended a free performance of Johannes Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem at the Unitarian church across the street. I went knowing nothing about Brahms except for some of his piano pieces that I had played in my late teens, back when I thought I would be a concert pianist. The “order of service” (the concert replaced the UU’s usual Sunday services) included a few pages explaining Brahms’ thinking and intention behind writing the requiem.
Many people are most familiar with Mozart’s concert setting of the requiem mass, immortalized in the film version of Amadeus. And some also know Verdi’s and Berlioz’s more dramatic requiems. (I personally love the Berlioz. Traditionally, the mass for the dead is about the suffering of sinners and the coming of judgment. It’s a reminder of the life after death where we meet our just ends. Brahms was a skeptic when it came to religion and wanted to create something more contemplative about death, more consoling to the suffering. He used the Christian Bible as text source, but chose passages that were in some ways more universal. According to the notes, he actually thought of it is a Requiem to console all mankind, rather than a “German” requiem (it was called that because he used Luther’s German translation for the text).
I am inept at describing music in words. Music, for me, is something felt, experienced, and therefore anchored in its time. And performed (as opposed to recorded) music has the added immediacy of being present with the artists. This morning’s performance was quasi-professional (an alumni chorus from Cal), but was clearly not polished like you’d find something down the street at Symphony Hall. But the music in that close, intimate sanctuary was nonetheless sublime. There are several passages where the music and words descend into a powerful, rhythm churning; and then where they soar. It has a really different feel from the Mozart and Berlioz Requiems, which though equally transcendent, but dark and brooding, in some ways, painful beauty. Brahms’, on the other hand, at the risk of sounding trite, uplifts and comforts.
It seems to combine the knowledge that this life is finite and short with the insistance that it still means something. I’ve been looking around online for a recording that I liked, and found a 2007 by the Berliner Philharmonker that I liked. If you’ve never heard it, set aside an hour, sit back and let Brahms transport you.
[apologies for the bad photo quality]
8 November 2008 at 9:20 pm
I was there as well – one of the baritones. Glad to hear that the experience was transcendant for listeners, as well. The music reached into my chest and pulled me upward. And then there’s the text. For fun, during one rehearsal, we sung the second movement in English instead of German. Though I’d read the Eng. words before, the process of forming them while performing the music… the force of emotion within me was almost overwhelming. The magic of music is that, when performed live, the composer comes back to life, and his or her inner self shares space within us for a spell…