Notes
on our 2008 Program
his year’s celebration of the Mount Desert Summer Chorale’s
40th anniversary presents the famous Three B’s of classical music:
Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Our program opens with two short festive works,
the first of which is an orchestration of Bach’s organ chorale on the beloved
hymn A Mighty Fortress is Our God. Walter Damrosch, the arranger, spent
many summers on Mount Desert Island until his home was destroyed in the famous Bar Harbor fire of 1947. Damrosch was an important part of the American classical music
scene in the first half of the twentieth century. As music advisor to NBC, he
oversaw many radio programs and conducted the first orchestral concert that was
broadcast coast-to-coast on radio. Damrosch is buried in Ledgelawn cemetery on Mount Desert Island, and his great-great nephew, David Damrosch, is a longtime member and
former president of the Mount Desert Summer Chorale.
The second work is the concluding chorus from
Beethoven’s oratorio, Christus am Ölberge (Christ on the Mount of Olives).
Best-known in English as Beethoven’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” it is a joyful hymn
of praise suitable for a celebration. The work, completed in 1803, belongs to
the outgoing, heroic decade of Beethoven’s career when he was writing such
grand pieces as the Third and Fifth Symphonies. Despite its somewhat old-fashioned
use of fugal style (a nod to the Baroque masters Bach and Handel), this short
anthem nevertheless speaks with Beethovenian vigor.
The main work on our program is the Requiem by
Brahms. While it may seem odd to celebrate an anniversary with a Requiem, the
piece is fitting for two reasons: first, it celebrates and honors all those who
have gone before us in creating the Mount Desert Summer Chorale, and second, it
is an uplifting, hopeful work full of promise for the future.
he key to Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem (A German
Requiem) may well lie in a statement the composer made to Karl Reinthaler,
who conducted the premiere of the complete work in Bremen on April 10, 1868: “…I
will confess that I should gladly have left out the ‘German’ [in the title] and
substituted ‘human.’” Brahms’s composition, a memorial not of any one death but
of all deaths, is indeed a work of consolation and assurance that transcends any
single creed to address all humanity.
Brahms worked on the Requiem
intermittently over a period of some fourteen years. The earliest material –
the opening of the second movement – dates from 1854, when it was sketched as
part of an aborted symphony in D minor. The last music was the fifth movement,
composed in June of 1868, after the first performance. Several pivotal events
in the composer’s life seem to have provided the impetus for the work: in 1854,
Robert Schumann, Brahms’s close friend, mentor, and enthusiastic supporter,
attempted suicide; Schumann died in an asylum in 1856; Brahms’s mother died in
1865. At each of these times, Brahms did some significant work on the Requiem.
The title itself may have been inspired by Schumann, who contemplated writing a
work by the same name. Despite its superficial connection to these events,
however, the German Requiem remains a meditation on death and
redemption, rather than a memorial either to Schumann or to Brahms’s mother.
Musically, the work reflects its composer’s
eclectic nature. There are influences of Beethoven (including quotations from
the Missa Solemmis and the Ninth Symphony), Cherubini (whose Requiem in C minor
omits violins in the first movement), J.S. Bach, and even the motets of such
Renaissance composers as Palestrina. Listening to the work, we are apt to be
caught up in its emotional character, its vibrant Romantic sonorities, and its
overall drama, and to overlook therefore the subtleties of its formal design.
Like some of the larger cantatas of Bach, the work is a symmetrical arch: the
first and seventh movements have similar texts and use some of the same musical
material; movements two and six are similar in structure, with march-like
openings and concluding fugues; movements three and five prominently feature
the soloists; and the fourth movement, the keystone of the arch, the musical
and emotional turning point, stands at the center.
But the vessel into which Brahms poured his
musical creativity is the text. As a large sacred work, the Requiem is
unique; for its text is neither liturgical (as in a Mass) nor a poetic meditation
on a Biblical narrative (as in an oratorio), but the composer’s own compilation
of texts from the German Bible and the Apocrypha. Its closest models might
therefore be such works as Bach’s Cantata 106, Gottes Zeit ist die
allerbeste Zeit, a funeral piece based on the Bible and chorale texts which
Bach may have chosen himself, and Handel’s Messiah, whose text Charles
Jennens compiled from the Old and New Testaments (and which contains the same
passages from I Corinthians which Brahms set in the sixth movement of the Requiem).
The text gives the work a personal aspect unmatched in the realm of sacred
music. To find a conception equally unified and self-expressive in the
nineteenth century, one must turn away from the church toward the opera house
and Wagner, who wrote his own librettos. As with Wagner, what Brahms set
is as important as how he set it.
Brahms’s text for the Requiem is
intricately constructed from quite disparate sources: the words of the Psalmist
are thus juxtaposed with the Sermon on the Mount in the first movement; the
second movement brings together the epistles of Peter and James with words from
the prophet Isaiah; Psalms dominate movements three and four, but at the end of
movement three are words from the Apocrypha; the brief fifth movement links St.
John with the Apocrypha and Isaiah; the sixth movement begins with St. Paul’s
letter to the Hebrews, followed by the passage from his first letter to the
Corinthians which figures in the Anglican Office for the Dead, and concluding
with an excerpt from the Book of Revelation; only the last movement deals with
a single Bible verse: the blessing of the dead comes from Revelation 14:13.
Yet despite the far-ranging choices, the texts
are often bound by harmonious images. “Those who bear sorrow” in St. Matthew
find their counterpart in “Those who sow with tears” in Psalm 126, and this
provides the basis for the first movement with its message of the joy that
shall emerge from sorrow. Nevertheless, it is too early in the work for
unalloyed happiness; the dark orchestration, with its absence of violins,
reminds us that the joy is only promised, it is not yet achieved. Further, the
opening text places the work on quite a different plane from the Latin Mass for
the Dead (the kind of work which usually bears the title “Requiem”). The Latin
Mass begins with a prayer for the eternal rest of the departed; Brahms begins
not with a prayer for the dead, but with a promise of consolation for the
living. It is only at the end of the work, once the message of redemption has
been played out, that Brahms turns his thoughts explicitly to the dead, and
here the words from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel (“Blessed are those
who bear sorrow”) find their reverberation in the Revelation of St. John
(“Blessed are the dead”).
Similarly, in the second movement, the withering
grass of St. Peter calls to Brahms’s mind the farmer awaiting the harvest in
St. James (the harvest image also recalls the sowing and reaping referred to in
the first movement). The words of St. Peter are the gloomiest in the work, and
Brahms provides them with some of the darkest music. They are counterbalanced
by the nearly untarnished joy of the concluding fugue with its words form
Isaiah. But we are still in the early stages of a journey toward true comfort,
as Brahms reminds us by his setting of the words “Schmerz” (sorrow) and
“Seufzen” (sighing). For even though in context the text says “sorrow and
sighing must be gone,” the music comes to a halt on those two words, placing
the “sorrow and sighing” very much in the present and the fleeing of pain in
the future. Both the first and second movements revolve around metaphors of
departing in sorrow (death) and returning in joy (resurrection).
The third movement is mainly a setting of Psalm
39, verses four though seven. As the text takes a personal turn (“teach me
well that I must have an end”—the first use of the first-person in the
work) Brahms introduces a solo singer. For a long while, the chorus can only
echo the baritone’s words, as though trying to understand their import. The
doubt comes to a head with the question, “Now, Lord, in whom shall I find
comfort?” which the chorus answers for itself: “I hope in you.” At the end, a
mighty fugue on the words “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God”
(Wisdom of Solomon 3:1) reaffirms the hope in God with which the Psalm text
concludes. Brahms portrays the hand of God by sustaining a D pedal throughout
the fugue, which depicts perfectly a kind of eternal stability.
With the fourth movement, we are at the very
gates of Heaven, “the forecourts of the Lord,” in the company of the joyous
souls. Even the harmony takes an upward turn at this point: the fourth movement
begins in a stunning E-flat major, after the unstinting D major of the third-movement
fugue. The disjunction becomes all the more startling as the flute and clarinet
sound their opening A-flat, a tritone away from the previous D.
For the soprano solo in the fifth movement,
Brahms produced his most subtle compilation of texts and provided them with a
setting that is a supreme expression of serenity, warmth, and consolation. The
opening text, from St. John, assures us that though we now have sorrow, we
shall find joy (another parallel to sowing in tears and reaping in joy in the
first movement). The anonymous “I” of the text then offers her own experience
as a reassuring precedent, using words from Ecclesiasticus: “Look at me: I
have, for a brief time, had trouble and labor, and have found great comfort.”
Comfort, the central message of the Requiem, provides the link to the
next lines, from Isaiah: “I will comfort you as one whose mother comforts him.”
Each of the three texts is in the first person (“I will see you,” “I…had
trouble,” “I will comfort you”), and even though three different speakers offer
these words in the scriptures, the soprano sings them as though they have come
from one source. We feel as though she speaks, for Brahms, to each of us
directly. It is the most intimate and personal moment in the work.
Contained in the sixth movement is a crucial
drama: first the chorus despairs, listlessly bewailing its own mortality, its
own impermanence. But the baritone, who was the voice of doom in the third
movement, now interrupts with a hopeful message, “we shall not all sleep.” As
in movement three, the chorus repeats his words, now with a wondrous aura of
promise and awe. By the middle of the piece, their excitement can no longer be
contained. In a taunting, jeering frenzy they demand, “Death, where is your
sting? Hell, where is your victory?” The movement ends with a joyous hymn of
praise to the power of God.
(A peculiarity of translation is worth pointing
out in this movement: in the original Greek text of Paul’s letter to the
Corinthians, the instrument that heralds the Last Judgment is given as σάλπιγγα
(sάlpinga, trumpet). For some reason, Martin Luther rendered this
as Posaune, “trombone,” in the German version (“trumpet” would be Trompete
in German). He may have thought that the trombone more accurately reflected the
ancient instrument. To English speakers, “the trombone shall sound” seems
strange, even humorous. But it is clear that Brahms has the trombone in
mind—the trombone section is featured prominently in the setting of those
words. Mozart similarly uses a trombone solo in his Requiem for the “tuba
mirum”—the miraculous horn heralding the Last Judgment. In my translation,
I’ve used “horn” at this spot as being somewhat more faithful to the German
while avoiding the possibly comic implications of the Last Trombone.)
The work comes full circle in the seventh
movement. Not only do its opening words echo those of the first movement, but
the continuation of the seventh movement text illuminates the first movement as
well. At the beginning, the Psalm spoke of sowing, of reaping, of bearing
precious seeds, and of carrying sheaves. Indeed, labor and laborers are a
recurring theme throughout the entire work: the farmer waits for precious fruit
in the second movement, people store things up vainly in the third movement, and
in movement five, the singer speaks of “trouble and labor.” But now, at last, the
dead rest from their labors, and they no longer bear the burden either of
sheaves or even of their good deeds, these simply follow them into Paradise. Brahms concludes this seventh movement with the same music that ended the first,
now rapturously played by the entire orchestra (only the trumpets and timpani
are silent), thus fulfilling the promise of joy foreshadowed at the beginning.
Brahms might well have called his composition “A
Human Requiem,” for it deals with human concerns and emotions: sorrow, trouble,
anxiety, the meaning of life and death, and the hope and promise of a better
life to come. Yet, in spite of its transcendent universality, it remains the
personal expression of a complex and powerfully creative spirit. The mighty
forces of the Requiem speak to all humanity with a single voice – that
of Brahms himself – and therein lies its power to touch us so deeply.
—David
Schildkret
