A few weeks ago MHS issued a recording of Verdi's Requiem; now here, close on its heels, is Brahms's. I doubt that two works written on the same subject and designed for similar occasions could be more different. Verdi chose as his text portions of the Mass for the Dead proper to funeral services in the Roman Catholic Church; Brahms combed the German language Bible (which he read as a daily custom) for suitable passages. Verdi’s treatment is public, rhetorical, operatic; Brahms's is personal, meditative, consolatory. Verdi expresses courage in the face of annihilation; Brahms expresses resignation to the inevitable and profound faith in what will follow. Verdi wrote his work near the end of his productive life; Brahms wrote his relatively early.
It has been argued that Brahms was, for the most part, a happy man--even a merry one. To be sure he was gregarious, had many friends and admirers, and like to joke and occasionally to kick up his heels. But there was a dark current that ran through his life, and he was never more successful musically than when he was dealing explicitly with such matters as loneliness and mortality. A lifelong bachelor, he was no stranger to the former and was at times openly bitter about it. He told Clara Schumann that the heartbreaking Alto Rhapsody-- a distillation of loneliness --was his wedding-song. He knew he was unlikely to produce another more optimistic. His attitude toward women was ambivalent. His sexual needs were taken care of by prostitutes, and in occasional bursts of rage, he would curse the whole sex as on the same footing. On the other hand, there were individual women, such as Clara Schumann, whom he helplessly adored from the foot of a very high pedestal. Both attitudes probably go back to an impoverished childhood in the Reepersbahn district of Hamburg, where, with his bass-playing father, he spent long nights making music for the bawdy-house clients.
But the woman he worshipped life was also part of the Hamburg days. She was his mother, Johanna--a plain, lame little person, seventeen years older than his father, but bright, industrious, and a bulwark against the world. In 1864, the parental marriage broke up, six months later Johanna was dead. The blow was the catalyst that produced the German Requiem.
Nine years earlier Brahms had set out to write a symphony expressing his shock and anguish at the death of his friend and champion Robert Schumann, but gave it up midway. Then he decided that a memorial cantata would be within his powers. He selected some Biblical texts and set one to music from the aborted symphony--an inexorable and yet paradoxically soothing funeral-march that later became the second movement of the Requiem. Moved by the new impetus, he completed the work (six movements rather than the projected one) and heard it performed in Hamburg. Later, in 1867, he added one more movement--the ethereally soaring Ye that now are sorrowful'" for a solo soprano. Ye shall again behold me," she sings, and the chorus intones, “I will comfort you as one whom his own mother comforteth;'' it was Brahms's tribute to Johanna. For Brahms, all flesh may indeed be as grass, but the grass bows down only to sow the seeds of life. The whole work is filled with a radiant expectation, and even the Last Judgment is an occasion for rejoicing rather than for terror.
The Bulgarian dramatic soprano Anna Tomowa-Sintow (who debuts with the Metropolitan Opera this season) has only recently appeared in another recorded German Requiem made on the west side of the Berlin wall with Karajan. Her partner here, Gunther Leib, was heard at the Met a couple of years ago as Beckmesser in Meistersinger.
