This Day in Classical Music History (Brahms’ ‘German Requiem’ Premieres)

April 10, 1868—After more than a decade in which he was seen as a composer of consummate talent by the likes of Robert and Clara Schumann, Johannes Brahms made his mark with Ein deutsches Requiem (“A German Requiem”), which premiered before a public audience on Good Friday in the cathedral of Bremen, Germany. 

Ever since taking a classical music course at Chautauqua Institution a few years ago, I have been struck by composers’ fascination with the requiem form. It took root in the Roman Catholic Church, but canonical pronouncements, beginning with the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent, to standardize the form have done little to limit its variety. Composers such as Johann Christian Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Verdi and Faure have found it not only deeply moving but adaptable to their purposes.

Nevertheless, the Brahms composition—in its most concentrated stretch, three years in the making—represented a departure of sorts that others would follow well into the 20^th and 21^st centuries. For one, the text followed not the traditional Latin mass but Luther's translation of the Bible into German. Second, Brahms—a humanist—could not bring himself to believing in, let alone celebrating, the afterlife common to the form beforehand. 

Not everyone was pleased by what they heard. George Bernard Shaw, in his pre-playwriting days as a music critic, wrote in 1890: "I do not deny that the Requiem is a solid piece of musical manufacture. You feel at once as though it could only have come from the establishment of a first-class undertaker. But I object to requiems altogether."

Composed in consolation to the living, Brahms’ greatest choral work, appearing as Germany unified through the machinations of Otto von Bismarck, also inadvertently served as confirmation of this new European superpower’s status. From Martin Luther to Johannes Brahms, Germany represented a capstone of culture. What could go awry in a fatherland or volk that could produce such creators? 

Plenty, as it turned out. Brahms disclaimed any notion that his title referred to anything more than language; he even insisted later that it might have been better titled “A Human Requiem.” But over time, even though it was never tarred by the anti-Semitic overtones that bothered so many about Brahms’ principal musical detractor, Richard Wagner, this composition became caught up inevitably in issues of nationalism. 

A couple of writers recognized this association—and commented ironically on it—by titling their own works on Germany coming to terms with its recent deadly past after Brahms’ masterwork. 

A German Requiem inspired the titles of Jorge Luis Borges' 1949 short story "Deutsches Requiem" and Philip Kerr's 1991 novel A German Requiem. Borges recounted the downward moral spiral of a Nazi war criminal as he awaits execution. Kerr’s last installment of his “Berlin Trilogy” featured Bernie Gunther, a cynical hard-boiled detective who found even more “mean streets” in the former German capital in 1947 than Philip Marlowe, his most obvious inspiration, ever did in Los Angeles in the same period. 

The German Requiem of Borges and Kerr memorialized a nation haunted not only by its war dead, but by the ideals of culture and liberal humanism that animated Johannes Brahms and the countrymen that came to admire him.