A German Requiem, Op. 45

Program notes

About the Work

Brahms’s A German Requiem is one of the supreme choral works of the nineteenth century, and unlike any requiem before it. It is not a setting of the Latin Mass for the Dead, with its prayers for departed souls and visions of judgement; instead Brahms chose his own texts, in German, from Luther’s Bible, and built a work not for the dead but for the living: for the bereaved, the mourning, those left behind. Its message is consolation: ‘Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted,’ sing the opening words. There is no Day of Wrath, no terror; the work moves instead from grief toward acceptance and peace.

Brahms composed it over several years in the 1860s, and it was almost certainly shaped by personal loss: the death of his beloved mentor Robert Schumann and, above all, of his mother in 1865. The tender fifth movement, for soprano solo (‘Ye now have sorrow… but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice’), was added last, in 1868, and is often heard as a song of maternal comfort. The Requiem was the work that made Brahms famous across Europe, and it remains a profound and consoling masterpiece. Tonight it pairs movingly with Mozart’s valedictory last concerto.

What to Listen For

Listen for the work’s overarching journey from grief to comfort, and for the way Brahms frames it: the first and last movements both begin with the word ‘Selig’ (‘Blessed’), and the very opening music returns, transformed, at the close, so the whole work comes full circle in peace.

Key moments to follow: the gentle, dark-hued opening chorus (‘Blessed are they that mourn’); the slow, tremendous funeral march of the second movement (‘For all flesh is as grass’), which builds to a blazing affirmation of resurrection; the great fugues that crown the third and sixth movements, written with Brahms’s matchless contrapuntal mastery; the radiant fourth movement (‘How lovely are thy dwellings’); and the two solos: the baritone (here bass-baritone Gerald Finley) meditating on human mortality in the third and sixth movements, and the soprano (Chen Reiss) bringing the work’s tenderest consolation in the fifth. Listen, above all, to the chorus, which carries the heart of this deeply humane meditation on loss and comfort.