“Selig sind, die da Leid tragen” from Ein deutsches Requiem
Composition and premiere: Brahms completed all but what is now the fifth movement of Ein deutsches Requiem in August 1866. Johannes Herbeck conducted the first three movements on December 1, 1867, in Vienna. The first performance of the six then-existing movements was given on Good Friday of 1868 in the Bremen cathedral; Brahms conducted, with Julius Stockhausen as baritone soloist. Brahms added the fifth movement (“Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit,” which calls for solo soprano) in May 1868, that movement first being sung on September 17 that year in Zurich. The soloist was Ida Suter-Weber, with Friedrich Hegar conducting the Tonhalle Orchestra. The first performance of the complete seven-movement work took place in Leipzig on February 18, 1869; Carl Reinecke conducted the Gewandhaus Orchestra and Chorus, with soloists Emilie Bellingrath-Wagner and Franz Krückl. The first BSO performances of Ein deutsches Requiem were led by Serge Koussevitzky in Boston in March 1926. Robert Shaw led the first Tanglewood performance on August 14, 1948.
When Johannes Brahms produced his most ambitious and heartfelt works, he was apt to be the most flippant and dismissive in talking about them. In April 1865 he sent Clara Schumann a draft toward a new piece, observing, “It’s probably the least offensive part of some kind of German Requiem. But since it may have vanished into thin air before you come to Baden, at least have a look at the beautiful words it begins with.” The chorus he is impugning, “How lovely is thy dwelling place, O Lord of Hosts,” of course did not vanish from A German Requiem. In fact, it is one of the most limpidly beautiful and beloved works in the entire choral repertoire.
In later years Brahms said, “I don’t like to hear that I wrote the Requiem for my mother.” By the law of Brahmsian obliqueness, that is a tacit admission that the death of his beloved mother in 1865 was part of the inspiration. He just didn’t like people talking about it. In a letter of 1873 he is forthright about the other half of its inspiration; after the collapse of a performance proposed for a Robert Schumann memorial, he insists “how completely and inevitably such a work as the Requiem belonged to Schumann.”
So A German Requiem had piercing personal associations for Brahms: the loss of his mother Christiane, and of Robert Schumann, his mentor and spiritual father. The inception of the work dates from the traumatic episode of May 1854: soon after proclaiming Brahms the coming genius of German music, Schumann plunged into the Rhine in an attempt at suicide. Within days, Brahms had sketched three movements of a two-piano sonata, which he later tried to turn into a symphony. The first movement of those unfinished works became the tumultuous first movement of the Piano Concerto in D minor. The original second movement, a kind of death march in triple time, eventually became the second movement of the Requiem: “For all flesh, it is as grass.”
The premiere of what was intended as the complete work took place in Bremen Cathedral on Good Friday, 1868. Afterward, on the advice of his old Hamburg teacher Eduard Marxsen, Brahms added the soprano solo as fifth movement. It is characteristic of Brahms to have created a memorial for two revered people as a sacred work (a conventional thing to do), to base the work on precedents in religious music (likewise conventional), yet to write a piece remarkably unlike any other. Ein deutsches Requiem is neither a Mass nor quite an oratorio. The title “Ein deutsches Requiem” gives us the first clue to the work’s singularity. This is “a” requiem, a personal memorial for the dead rather than “the” familiar Catholic one.
Beyond that, the work is so spiritual and so Protestant in tone that few listeners notice a strange omission in the text: it never mentions the eponymous founder of the Christian religion. The composer wrote, “I confess that I would gladly omit even the word ‘German’ and instead use ‘Human.’” If Brahms was a North German Protestant by upbringing and temperament, he was also a skeptic and agnostic—in the terms of our day, a “secular humanist.”
Brahms wrote his Requiem not as an address to the dead but to comfort the living. “Selig,” “blessed,” begins Ein deutsches Requiem [“Blessed are they”]. At the end of its journey the music comes to rest on the word “selig.” The first blessing is for the living, the last for those who are gone, who rest from their labors. These first words foreshadow the purpose of the Requiem, and its progression from darkness to light.
From notes by Jan Swafford
Jan Swafford is a prizewinning composer and writer whose acclaimed books include Mozart: The Reign of Love, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, Johannes Brahms: A Biography, The Vintage Guide to Classical Music, and Language of the Spirit: An Introduction to Classical Music. He is an alumnus of the Tanglewood Music Center, where he studied composition.