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Johannes Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requiem
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Johannes Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requiem
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This work, completed in 1868, was the breakthrough piece in which Johannes Brahms, the young piano lion, created a large-scale orchestral-and-choral work and moved into his artistic maturity. The work was long and painful in its genesis, being inspired initially in 1865 by his mother's death, and moved forward by his friend Robert Schumann's attempted suicide. At least one movement was discarded, and recycled in the first piano concerto, and the soprano-solo movement was added in 1868 to help balance gloom with tenderness. The product is Brahms's longest single work, and a masterful summary of all the curious contradictions at work in Brahms's mind. It is deeply religious, offering solace to the bereaved with texts from the Bible, and painting a series of dramatic pictures, from the beauty of the Lord's dwelling place to man's insignificance before God, to man's redemption by faith. But at the same time, it is a humanist, secular work: Brahms chose texts from the Bible, rather than traditional liturgical chant, and used his vernacular German, rather than Latin. (He almost called it a "Human Requiem," and one wonders if he would have encouraged vernacular-language performances in non-German lands.) His texts dwell at length on God, but make no mention of Christ. He depicts the Last Trumpet and death swallowed in victory in boisterously loud fashion (the orchestra makes a particularly chilling depiction of the earth trembling and quaking open), but there is no mention of Judgment or eternal damnation. Brahms works at once on his customary, exquisitely detailed miniaturist scale, but also uses thematic repetition and finely detailed scoring to lend dramatic and logical unity on a grand scale. And he borrows from the ideas of masters of the past (Heinrich Sch¨tz for text selection and methods of choral writing; Beethoven for the dissonance-fugue transition of the finale of the 9th symphony) to create a wholly new means of choral expression, one which would influence requiems for generations to come.
Posted to: rec.music.classical.recordings
Subject: Brahms's German Requiem
Date: Tue, 27 May 1997
Patrick Rose asked:
I went into Barnes and Noble today to get a recording of Brahm's Requiem and found that there were at least twelve different recordings. Any suggestions on which recording of the requiem to purchase?
This is probably more than you want to know, but ...
Unfortunately, I have yet to hear a no-holds-barred runaway favorite in the Brahms Requiem. It seems kind of odd that this should be the case; Brahms was very detailed in his instructions about how to handle phrasing, dynamics, use of staccato and tenuto markings, etc., but many performances utterly fail to observe these markings. The ones that do, don't always manage to bring off Brahms's extraordinary effects in a convincing fashion. There must be something in the electricity of a live performance that I haven't heard captured on disc. Here are some thoughts on a few that I've heard:
There are a few major ones that I have not heard yet, including Rudolf Kempe's EMI recording (falls somewhere between Karajan '47 and Klemperer, I think), Sinopoli, Sawallisch, and Masur. But one way or another, the perfect German Requiem doesn't exist yet, at least for me. One needs a mix of power and delicacy (particularly in "So seid nun geduldig," which seems heavy even in Gardiner's hands). Herreweghe comes closer than anyone else for me, but even that would be an unfortunate compromise in some ways.
Submitted with the usual IMHO's, YMMV's, and apologies in advance for logorrheic excesses.
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