Saturday June 14th 730 PM St Paul's Church Concord
Sunday June 15th, 4PM Plymouth Congregational Church
Tickets Online at www.nhmasterchorale.org
$33 Adults, $25 Senior/Military
Free for students K-Undergraduate
PROGRAM NOTES
A Universal Requiem
By Richard Knox
Johannes Brahms was anxious about the premiere of A German Requiem. Just 15 years earlier he’d been an unknown stripling from the slums of Hamburg who had helped support his family by playing piano in bordellos.
But that 20-year-old Brahms set his sights high. Toting a satchel of his own compositions, he presented himself on the doorstep of the great Romantic composer Robert Schumann. After hearing him play, Schumann publicly pronounced this kid the worthy successor of Beethoven – “the future of German music,” no less, for his remarkable ability to meld classical forms and Romantic expressiveness.
Since then Brahms had labored to live up to Schumann’s sweeping prophecy. But, at 34, he had never put forth anything as long, large-scale and daring as A German Requiem. (In fact, although he later wrote symphonies, he never would compose anything as ambitious.)
But a preview performance of the first three movements was a near-fiasco when the timpanist misread a dynamic marking in the third movement, hammering the persistent low-D drumbeat with such fortississimo that the large choir’s intricate fugue could scarcely be heard. Hisses and boo’s emerged from the audience, and one critic complained the experience felt like “rattling through a tunnel in an express train.”
More significantly, Brahms fretted about how the public would receive his unorthodox Requiem. It departed radically from conventional expectations of the Requiem Mass: A prayer for the souls of the departed, typically in Latin, with emphasis on purgatory and the Day of Judgment.
His Requiem mainly offered consolation to those who mourn as they confront the mystery of death, and only in the final movement did it bless the departed. As one commentator observed, Brahms’ version contained no “bowing to the altar or smell of incense.” Another contemporary inferred that Brahms’ religious beliefs, so far as they were known, were “complex and skeptical.”
Most radically, Brahms’ Requiem made no mention at all of Jesus Christ.
Brahms’ friend Karl Reinthaler, appointed to conduct the premiere on Good Friday of 1868 in the enormous Bremen Cathedral, gently asked the composer if he might insert Christ somewhere.
Brahms flatly refused. As his Requiem made apparent, he had deep knowledge of the Lutheran Bible – he once wrote that he read it every day -- and of religious music going back hundreds of years. But Brahms had his own theology. He did not consider Christ the particular son of God. He was aiming for a universal Requiem, one not bound to the central Christian dogma.
“I confess I would gladly omit even the word German and instead use Human,” Brahms famously wrote Reinthaler. “…But I had better stop before I say too much.”
To placate the pious, a compromise was reached. “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth,” the familiar soprano aria from Handel’s Messiah, and selections from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion were dropped into the new Requiem’s performance.
As it turned out, there was no furor. A German Requiem was an immediate smash hit. As the contemporary Brahms biographer Jan Swafford writes, without exaggeration, it represented “the birth of something that would live long in music and in the heart of humanity.”
It was also the foundation of Brahms’ subsequent illustrious career. In the first year after its premiere, Brahms’ Requiem had 20 performances throughout Germany – though mostly in the Protestant north rather than the Catholic south. It was soon heard in Russia, England, Paris and then the West. It “found success that relatively few composers have ever achieved by the beginning of middle age,” Swafford notes.
Today, 157 years after its premiere, the Brahms Requiem remains a beloved favorite. Master Chorale director Dan Perkins says Brahms clearly achieved his goal to write a universal Requiem.
“I love the fact that Brahms, deeply spiritual but not a particularly religious person, chose to compose a sacred work meant to provide spiritual comfort and hope not in a church, but in a concert hall,” Perkins says. “Earlier Requiems and those by Brahms' contemporaries are driven by a fearful, Dante-esque view of the afterlife and the wages of sin. We’re allowed to ponder the mysteries of life and death as a community without the restrictions and personal baggage associated with religious dogma.”
But as ecumenical and broadly appealing as Brahms’ Requiem is, it’s also a deeply personal statement – strikingly so from a man who was so notoriously private that he destroyed nearly all his correspondence and many musical scores he considered unworthy.
One wellspring of Brahms’ Requiem was the death, a dozen years before its premiere, of Robert Schumann at age 46, in a mental asylum, possibly of end-stage syphilis. In his grief Brahms began sketching the funereal march (actually in the ¾ time of a somber sarabande) that would evolve into the Requiem’s second movement, which begins “For mortal flesh is as the grass” (in contemporary translation).
However, Brahms didn’t begin work on the Requiem in earnest until nine years later, when his mother died of a stroke. Christiane Brahms was a seamstress and domestic worker whose 76 years were burdened by relentless toil and poverty. Brahms memorialized her in Movement V, which was missing from the premiere but added soon after. It concludes with a passage from Isaiah 66:13 that poignantly expresses the composer’s own yearning for consolation:
I will give you comfort,
As one whom his own mother comforts.
A Different Brahms Requiem
Brahms’ original score of A German Requiem called for an orchestra of as many as 71 players. The premiere involved a chorus of 200, and typical performances since have followed this maximalist model – if usually, in our time, not quite so chorally grand. But the composer realized such large forces would put it beyond the capacity of many groups to tackle.
So within three years of the premiere Brahms prepared a version for chamber choir and two pianos, first performed in London in July 1871. (That city wouldn’t hear an orchestral performance for another two years.)
The slimmed-down version featured in these Master Chorale performances is a very different piece than the original German Requiem. But it would be a mistake to think of it as diminished or cheapened. This chamber Requiem has integrity and charms of its own. The colors and textures of the richly scored orchestral version are supplanted by an intimate, more transparent musical architecture.
For instance, the third and sixth movements feature intricate fugues, with overlapping thematic lines that can be obscured by orchestral accompaniment. The piano underlay allows these complex choral lines to be clear and airy. Here and elsewhere, the inner voices (altos and tenors) shine forth.
Most strikingly, the piano accompaniment foregrounds the chorus, allowing more nuanced and expressive presentation of Brahms’ carefully chosen texts. This is further enhanced in these performances through a 1997 English translation by Lara Hoggard.
“It’s a grand, universal hymn to life,” Perkins says. “Without the barriers of language and large orchestral forces, this experience with the Brahms Requiem has the ability to meet the performers and listeners where we are.”
More Brahms, More Yearning
The concerts’ second half opens with more Brahms, not monumental this time but in the personal voice of a Romantic poem set as a German Lied, or art-song. Such choral Lieder make up a substantial portion of the composer’s output.
The poem Waldesnacht or Woodland Night, by the German poet Paul Heyse, was set to music by dozens of 19th-century composers. After hearing Brahms’ Requiem it’s plain to see what moved him to add another. It portrays the “wild heart” of a Romantic poet who seeks respite from “worldly thunder” in the cool calm of a forest at night.
“Just as in the Requiem,” Perkins says, Waldesnacht is “suffused with a longing for solace and peace, calmness and rest.”
Next in the program comes another yearning for release, this time from oppression and captivity -- literal or metaphorical. The Caged Bird Sings for Freedom by Joel Thompson is, of course, inspired by Maya Angelou’s popular 1969 memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, about her upbringing in the Jim Crow South. Thompson’s 2016 piece, for chorus and solo woodwind (in this concert, an oboe) sets Angelou’s powerful poem of the same name.
Thompson is best-known for the choral work "Seven Last Words of the Unarmed," which the Master Chorale performed in June, 2022. Caged Bird continues his social justice theme. Though it brings to mind the long history of Black Americans Angelou spoke for, in our current time it evokes other images, such as immigrants detained and deported to uncertain fates in foreign jails.
The piece begins with images of a bird free to ride the wind and “claim the sky.” But when captured by oppressive forces, the free bird – the oboe is his avatar – wails and flutters to earth. Captured, the caged bird can only stalk his narrow prison with clipped wings and bound feet. “So he opens his throat to sing…for freedom.”
The caged bird’s song, first heard by an alto soloist, is
…A fearful trill
Of things unknown
But longed-for still
The solo voice resurrects the fallen oboe/avatar. The chorus, now representing the caged bird, keeps its spirit alive by singing “for freedom.”
Perkins sees “the connection of the caged bird to the Requiem’s ageless, constant, soul-seeking search for freedom, peace and rest.”
Richard Knox sings baritone with the Master Chorale and has written program notes since the 2016-2017 season. He lives in Sandwich, NH.
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