1 CD - 88697 72066 2 - (p) 2010

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)





Ein deutsches Requiem, Op. 45
72' 01"



- Selig sind, die da Leid tragen - Chor (Ziemlich langsam und mit Ausdruck)
 9' 58"
1
- Den alles Fleisch, es it wie Gras - Chor (Langsam, marschmäßig)
 16' 02"
2
- Herr, lehre doch mich - Bariton & Chor (Andante moderato)
 10' 47"
3
- Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen - Chor (Mäßig bewegt)
 5' 54"
4
- Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit - Sopran & Chor (Langsam)
 7' 00"
5
- Denn wir haben hie keine bleibende Statt - Bariton & Chor (Andante)
 12' 35"
6
- Selig sind die Toten - Chor (Feierlich)
 9' 45"
7



 
Genia Kühmeier, Soprano
Thomas Hampson, Baritone

Arnold Schoenberg Chor
Wiener Philharmoniker

Nikolaus Harnoncourt
 
Luogo e data di registrazione
Musikverein, Vienna (Austria) - dicembre 2007
Registrazione live / studio
studio
Producer / Engineer
Martin Sauer / Michael Brammann
Prima Edizione CD
RCA "Red Seal" - 88697 72066 2 - (1 cd) - 72' 10" - (p) 2010 - DDD
Prima Edizione LP
-

Notes
Strictly speaking, the genesis of Brahms‘s German Requiem stretches back to the composer's youth when, as a twenty-year-old, he left his native Hamburg for the first time in his life: the earlier, unacknowledged prodigy from a modest lower-middle-class background had become a mature pianist thanks to his lessons with the city’s leading music teacher, Eduard Marxsen. In April 1853 he set off with the violinist Eduard Reményi on a concert tour of Germany. En route he met a number of eminent figures from the world of music, all of whom were to influence his subsequent career and who included the violinist, composer and conductor Joseph Joachim, the pianist and composer Franz Liszt, who was then in Weimar, and finally, Robert and Clara Schumann, with whom he became so friendly that he remained with them in Düsseldorf for a period of several weeks. All three took a positively delirious delight in each other’s company, a situation that was, however, made more difficult when Brahms secretly and hopelessly fell in love with Clara Schumann, who was almost fourteen years older than he was. Her husband was so enthusiastic about the talented young musician that on 28 October 1853 he published an appreciative article in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, hailing Brahms as a future saviour of music: "I felt certain that [...] there would suddenly emerge an individual fated to give expression to the times in the highest and most ideal manner, who would achieve mastery, not step by step, but at once, springing like Minerva fully armed from the head of Jove. And now here he is, a young fellow at whose cradle graces and heroes stood watch. His name is Johannes Brahms."
The first of Brahms‘s published works appeared in Leipzig at the end of 1853, and yet they left their composer still feeling unsure of himself, a point that emerges not least from his great Sonata in D minor for two pianos, which he began in 1847 and continued to work on until 1854, before discarding it. While working as chorus master in Detmold from 1857 to 1860, he toyed with the idea of turning it into a symphony but finally used the material as the basis of his First Piano Concerto in D minor of 1859. The march-intermezzo that was originally intended for the sonata/symphony later became the second movement of the German Requiem. During the years that followed, Brahms sought to deepen his understanding of the technical tools of his trade by studying counterpoint with Joachim and by taking a detailed interest in the vocal music of Palestrina, Schütz, Handel and Bach. In 1856 he started work on a Missa canonica in D minor for unaccompanied choir that he again discarded. And from 1859 to 1862 he conducted a women's choir in Hamburg. During the 1863/64 season, finally, he was chorus master of the Vienna Singakademie, where he acquired a practical knowledge of the oratorio repertory. The death of his mentor, friend and rival Robert Schumann in 1856 was a bitter blow for him, and it is possible that one response to his loss was the Begräbnisgesang op. 13 for choir and wind band that he wrote in Detmold in November 1858. A visionary funeral march, it is an important precursor of the Requiem in terms of both words and music.
At first sight, Brahms‘s decision to start work on his Requiem appears to have been prompted by the death of his mother in February 1865, and yet the earliest sketches may well date back to 1861, the fifth anniversary of Schumann's death. Only gradually did the work acquire the form that is familiar to us today: the penultimate movement was completed by April 1865 and the first two movements had at least been sketched by this date; the full score of the work's initial version was finished by the summer of 1866. It was also performed piecemeal: the first three movements were introduced to a Viennese audience in the city’s Redoutensaal at the second concert of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde on 1 December 1867. The chorus was the local Singverein and the conductor was Johann Herbeck. In the wake of the performance, Brahms undertook a number of changes to the score, adding an organ part and - in the event of the non-availability of such an instrument - a part for a contrabassoon.
The real first performance was given in Bremen Cathedral on 10 April 1868, when Brahms himself conducted the city’s 200-strong Singakademie at the invitation of its principal conductor, Carl Martin Reinthaler. The large orchestra featured no fewer than twenty-four violins. The programme included not only a number of pieces for solo violin played by Joseph Joachim, who almost certainly acted as leader for the rest of the concert, but also three movements from Handel's Messiah, "Behold the Lamb of God", "I know that my Redeemer liveth” and the "Hallelujah" Chorus, and, finally, the aria "Erbarme dich" from Bach’s St Matthew Passion sung by Joachim's wife, Amalie Weiss. The British Brahms scholar, Robert Rascall, has noted that this group of works offers "interesting commentary on the structure, expressive range and message of the Requiem itself.". In particular, "I know that my Redeemer liveth" for soprano solo served as a model for what is now the Requiem’s fifth movement, "Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit", which Brahms added only after the Bremen performance and which was originally intended to be in fourth position. The first complete performance of all seven movements was given in Dessau at Christmas 1868, when Adolf Schubring conducted a chorus of twelve with piano accompaniment. In January 1869 he reported enthusiastically on the performance in the columns of the Leipzig-based Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. The first complete performance with full orchestra and chorus was conducted by Carl Reinecke within the framework of the Leipzig Gewandhaus's seventeenth subscription concert on 18 February 1869. The work's subsequent history is one long success story, confirming Brahms’s reputation as one of the leading composers of his age. Between 1869 and 1876, no fewer than ninety-seven performances are known to have taken place in Europe alone.
It is worth noting that the work found a home for itself in the concert hall rather than in church, a development that undoubtedly reflects the composer’s interdenominational outlook. In the course of the 19th century organizations founded to perform oratorios enjoyed a tremendous vogue with ever-increasing numbers of members: between 1859 and 1878, the Vienna Singverein, for example, grew from 122 members to 360. As a result, there were many concerts at this time with very large choirs and correspondingly large orchestras: in 1882, for instance, Brahms conducted a performance of his Requiem with the Hamburg Bach Society, which fielded a choir of 225 members and an orchestra of seventy-six. Even greater forces are known to have been involved in the major music festivals of the time. In general, however, it was local conditions and the particular venue that dictated the size of the orchestra and choir and the way in which they were arranged on the stage. According to a contemporary seating plan by Henri Kling, the stage of the old Leipzig Gewandhaus during the musical directorship of Carl Reinecke from 1860 to 1895 could accommodate up to 540 choristers in addition to twenty first and twenty second violins, thirteen violas, twelve cellos and ten double basses alongside the wind players.
At the same time, however, we know that Brahms preferred smaller orchestras. According to Robert Pascall, the orchestra that gave the first performance of his First Symphony in Karlsruhe in 1876 comprised fortynine players, while the Meiningen Hofkapelle, with which he worked closely from 1880 onwards, had a similar number. When his Fourth Symphony was performed there in 1885 he resisted the idea of increasing the number of strings. He also prepared a version of his Requiem for solo voices and two pianos that was intended to be performed in smaller venues and that enjoyed considerable popularity for many years, a popularity that shows some signs of returning today. Brahms himself anticipated this development when, adopting a note of irony, he wrote to his publisher, Fritz Simrock: "I have abandoned myself to the noble task of making my immortal work palatable to the four-handed soul. It cannot perish now."
In his excellent monograph on Orchestral Performance Practices in the Nineteenth Century - Size, Proportions, and Seating [Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1986, reprint 2010], Daniel J. Koury reproduces more than one hundred seating plans from the 19th century, the vast majority of which indicate that the first and second violins were arranged antiphonally to the left and right of the conductor. It is clear from Brahms’s score that he, too, counted on this arrangement in his Requiem. Instruments from the years before 1900 were up to a third smaller than they are today, while the wind instruments had narrower bores and were also far more colourful than many modern instruments. The lower Paris Kammerton was introduced to Viennese orchestras in 1862, while valve trombones remained in use there until as late as 1883. Wound gut strings were preferred. The sort of permanent vibrato that gradually emerged in the 1930s was not yet customary. As one of the most influential violinists of his age, Joseph Joachim employed a subtly differentiated bowing technique to achieve the intensity of his playing. The tuning, moreover, was harmonically pure.
The German Requiem is the first of only six works by Brahms for which authentic metronome markings exist. They derive from suggestions made by the composer's friend, Carl Martin Reinthaler, and indicate fluid tempi. If these markings are observed, a performance of the Requiem should last between sixty and sixty-five minutes. Of course, these are merely guidelines and need to be interpreted flexibly, forthe English pianist Fanny Davies described Brahms's style of performance as follows: "Brahms’s manner of interpretation was free, very elastic and expansive; but the balance was always there - one felt the fundamental rhythms underlying the surface rhythms. [...] He would linger not on one note alone, but on a whole idea, as if unable to tear himself away from its beauty. He would prefer to lengthen a bar or phrase rather than spoil it by making up the time into a metronomic bar." Brahms himself emphasized the importance of rubato, but, like everything else, he also stressed that shifts in the tempo should be undertaken "con discrezione". In short, the strict tempo of a movement or work and the relationship between the different tempi must retain their significance, but imperceptible transitions, ritardandos and accelerandos were explicitly demanded as a way of interpreting the piece as if it were a living, breathing organism.
Brahms had been baptised into the Lutheran faith in St Michael’s Church in Hamburg, but when he came to assemble the texts for his German Requiem, he chose words for their interdenominational appeal. As he himself put it, he wanted to write funeral music for people in general, otherwise he might just as well have set the Latin words familiar from the Mass for the Dead. His profession of faith in the age-old tradition of church music, by contrast, is clear not least from the fact that the whole of the work’s thematic material is derived from Luther’s Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten. Other influences include Handel`s Messiah, Schubert’s Mass in E flat major and Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, Schütz's Musikalische Exequien ["eine teutsche Begräbniß Missa", i.e., "a German burial Mass"] and, especially, Bach’s St Matthew Passion and Actus tragicus. As such, this list constitutes a compendium of early church music of altogether exemplary status similar to the one intended by Mozart for his unfinished Requiem. At the same time, Brahms’s German Requiem itself pointed the way forward. Gabriel Fauré, for example, took up the opening of Brahms’s work in his own Requiem, which is scored for lower strings and which received its first performance in 1888. Writing in 1875, the doyen of Viennese music critics, Eduard Hanslick, noted that "In Brahms’s Requiem we see the purest artistic means employed in pursuit of the highest goal, while warmth and depth of feeling are combined with consummate technical mastery. There is no-thing to dazzle the senses, and yet everything is profoundly moving. There are no novel orchestral effects, but only new and grand ideas and, the work’s richness and originality notwithstanding, the most noble naturalness and simplicity."
If the work creates the impression of great clarity, this is due not least to its symmetrical seven-part structure. Formally related to one another, the first and last movements provide a framework for the Requiem as a whole. Both share the words "Selig sind" ["Blessed are"] and both are in the key of F major, a pastoral key traditionally associated with the birth of Christ. The second and sixth movements are the most complex of all, and both are in minor keys. The three middle movements are lyrical intermezzos. At the same time, however, the work's dramaturgical structure is based on that of the traditional Latin Mass for the Dead with a number of central elements. An important role is played by the funeral march in movements I-III and VI; the fourth and fifth movements include elements of the Sanctus; the words of the sixth movement clearly allude to the Last Judgement, corresponding to the liturgy’s "Libera me"; and the final movement takes up the idea of the procession to the grave, the "In paradisum", a section of the liturgy rarely set to music. The themes and motifs from all the movements are hard to identify at an initial hearing, even though they are rigorously interrelated. The three-note motif that accompanies the opening words "Selig sind", F-A-B flat, is also heard in inversion at the start of the second movement [G flat-F-D flat] and may derive from the Chorale Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr. No less striking are the triadic themes, the triad being a long-established symbol of the Trinity in music. Finally, there are several allusions that will be picked up only by insiders, references to other sacred works that well-meaning friends pointed out to Brahms, prompting what we know to have been a typically surly reaction on his part: he wanted his music to create an impression on the strength of its own internal merits alone. And yet music lovers everywhere will have no difficulty in recognizing an allusion to the opening of the chorus "O Mensch, bewein dein Sünde groß" from Bach’s St Matthew Passion in the opening bars of the Requiem’s final movement.
Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs, Bremen
Translation: Daphne Ellis

Nikolaus Harnoncourt (1929-2016)
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