Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem)

Selig sind die da Leid tragen (Blessed are they that mourn)

Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras (Behold, all flesh is as the grass)

Herr, lehre doch mich (Lord, make me to know)

Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen (How lovely is Thy dwelling place)

Ihr habt nun traurigkeit (Ye now are sorrowful)

Denn wir haben hie (Here on earth)

Selig sind dit Toten (Blessed are the dead)

Among the more interesting projects Schumann had in mind but never developed was a “German Requiem.” Brahms might well have known about it. Certainly, his own German Requiem is intimately connected with Schumann’s death, although it wasn’t until nine years after that event, on the death of his mother in 1865, that he started writing the music for it. His painstaking work on compiling the text, on the other hand, from the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha of the Lutheran Bible, must have started much earlier than that - presumably as the first stage in paying a large-scale tribute to his late friend in a way which would be worthy of him and which he would himself have approved of.

Brahms had been similarly moved by Schumann’s suicide attempt in 1854. The creative result of that was a work which eventually became the turbulent First Piano Concerto in D minor, completed after Schumann’s death and enshrining a memorial to him in the central Adagio. One of the movements discarded in the process was a kind of sarabande, the theme of which Brahms now used as the main theme of the second movement of the German Requiem, Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras. With its Schumann associations and its resemblance to the melody of the chorale, Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten, by the seventeenth-century Lutheran composer Georg Neumark, it must have seemed heaven-sent for this particular purpose. The chorale melody is also incorporated in the first movement, Selig sind, and, on the recall of those words, in the last movement too.

So, although Brahms’s work on the score was stimulated by the death of his mother, the German Requiem as first performed in six movements in Bremen Cathedral on Good Friday in 1868 was his long matured tribute to Schumann. It was only after that performance, when it had become clear that something was missing both structurally and spiritually, that Brahms added what is now the fifth movement. Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit is very clearly addressed by the bereaved son to his mother. It is also, in its prophecy of the Resurrection in words taken from St John, the only allusion to specifically Christian doctrine in the whole work.

Brahms was a Christian only in the broadest sense. But for fear of causing offence, he would rather have called this, the longest work he ever wrote, “a human Requiem.” Not for him the wrath of the Dies Iræ and the liturgical imperatives of the Roman Mass for the Dead. The message of the German Requiem, symbolised by its mainly major tonalities rising ever upwards, is one of hope and consolation for the living.

Gerald Larner©