Overture Magazine - 2015-2016 Season March-April 2016 | Page 18

{ program notes
outer sections emphasizing stately dotted
rhythms enclosing a faster, fugal middle
section. Here the music is very grand
indeed, with its majestic rising phrases
italicized by the brilliance of the trumpets and the roll of the kettledrum.
This is followed by an Air, a pair of
Gavottes, a Bourrée, and a buoyantly
bounding Gigue to finish. The Air is
one of Bach’s most famous and loveliest
creations. Adapted for solo violin by A.
Wilhelmj in 1871, it has become almost
too familiar as the “Air on the G String.”
But listen to how much more beautiful it sounds in Bach’s original setting,
with the two violin parts and the violas
weaving in rich counterpoint above the
walking bass-line.
Instrumentation: Two oboes, bassoon, three
trumpets, timpani, harpsichord, and strings.

A German Requiem, opus 45

Johannes Brahms

Born in Hamburg, Germany, May 7, 1833;
died in Vienna, Austria, April 3, 1897

HONY
P E A B O DY SY M P
ORCHE STR A
nductor
Leon Fleisher,

guest co

Symphony
adeus Mozart:
Wolfgang Am
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1,
55
or, K.
No. 41 in C maj
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ph
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aninoff: Sy
Sergei Rachm
. 27
in E minor, Op

Saturday, April 30 at 8:00 pm
Miriam A. Friedberg Concert Hall
$15 Adults, $10 Seniors, $5 Students
For tickets, call 410-234-4800
or visit peabody.jhu.edu/events.

16 O v ertur e |

www. bsomusic .org

In early February 1865, Johannes Brahms
received a telegram from his brother, Fritz,
in Hamburg: “If you want to see our mother again, come at once.” The composer
traveled as fast as he could from Vienna,
but arrived too late; Christiane Brahms had
already died of a stroke at age 76. Though
he maintained a stoical face before his family, Brahms was devastated by the loss of
the mother who had stood lovingly by him
through all his trials and triumphs. After
he returned to Vienna, his friend Josef
Gänsbacher dropped in at his apartment
and found him playing Bach’s Goldberg
Variations with tears streaming down his
face. Brahms briefly told Gänsbacher of his
loss, but never stopped playing.
That grief would generate the composer’s
longest and most profound work:
A German Requiem (Ein Deutsches Requiem), mostly composed over a one-year
period from 1865 to 1866. But the music
for this masterpiece had been gestating for
at least a decade, and it was originally intended as a memorial to Robert Schumann,
Brahms’ discoverer and mentor.

Thus A German Requiem is actually
a memorial to two important people in
Brahms’ life: his biological mother and
his artistic father. And it was an intensely
personal and original work. Unlike most
musical requiems, it is not based on the
liturgical Catholic rite for the dead, a
service emphasizing prayers for the souls of
the departed. Rather, it is an idiosyncratic
Protestant setting, with its text drawn by
Brahms himself from the Old and New
Testaments and the Apocrypha of Martin
Luther’s German Bible. The emphasis is
not on the dead but on finding consolation
for the living, as stated in the Requiem’s
very first line from St. Matthew’s Gospel,
“Blessed are they that mourn.”
A word about Brahms’ own religious
stance: The composer was raised in the
Protestant tradition and remained a faithful reader of the Bible throughout his life.
But in adulthood, he became a religious
skeptic bordering on agnosticism and was
never a churchgoer. The text he assembled
for his Requiem expresses more or less his
own convictions: a universal, nondenominational message, but not a specifically
Christian one. Premiered in Leipzig on
February 18, 1869, A German Requiem is
a strikingly original work with few parallels before or since.
Listening to the Music

Constructing solid musical architecture
was always an important concern for
Brahms, and so the Requiem is shaped
as a mighty arch. The quieter, more
restrained first and last movements mirror
each other, as do the more dramatic and
forceful second and sixth movements, and
the more personal third and fifth movements dominated by solo voices. The wellloved fourth movement, “How lovely are
Thy dwelling places,” stands alone as an
intimate and untroubled central interlude.
Even though it is in the major mode
— F Major, the Requiem’s home key —
movement one, “Blessed are they who
mourn,” is weighed down with grief.
Brahms chose a very dark-toned ensemble:
violas, cellos, double basses, and the more
somber wind colors, omitting the brighter
sounds of clarinets, trumpets, and even
violins. The first melody we hear, in the