Over 150 years ago, Johannes Brahms began work on his masterpiece, A German Requiem. It premiered in Bremen, Germany, in 1868, one month before Brahms’s 35th birthday, and it was very well received. One reviewer exclaimed: “What we have heard today is a great and beautiful work, deep and intense in feeling, ideal and lofty in conception. Yes, one may well call it an epoch-making work!”1
Of course, epoch-making works do not come easily. And though our praise of such achievements is sincere, we rarely appreciate fully the events and the emotions that produce them.
Brahms composed the Requiem while mourning the death of his mother and the death of his friend and mentor Robert Schumann. These losses grieved Brahms deeply and may have inspired his work. As one commentator explained: “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 the generations since it was first sung in Bremen.”2
Acclaimed conductor Robert Shaw said of the Brahms Requiem: “Though it was his longest work and acknowledged as very pivotal to his growing renown, he himself was not really satisfied with the title of German Requiem, saying that it referred solely to the language in which it was written. He would now prefer, he said, a ‘human’ Requiem, for he was writing in exploration of a universal human experience.”3
The fact that this masterpiece continues to comfort and inspire today is evidence that Brahms achieved his goal.
Lord, help me to understand that my
Life on earth must have an end,
That I must depart.
Blessed are they that mourn,
For they shall have comfort—
They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.
Yea, I will comfort you,
As one whom his own mother comforts.
Blessed are they that mourn.
Program #4076
1In Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography (1997), 330.
2Johannes Brahms: A Biography, 318.
3“In Celebration of Johannes Brahms (1833–1897),” Music and the Spoken Word, Aug.10, 1997.