How we respond to any music has a lot to do with the associations of our personal reception history.

The Brahms German Requiem (Ein deutsches Requiem, nach Worten der heiligen Schrift, 1865–68)—humanist rather than Christian—was one of the first major choral works that I got to know, playing it quite regularly around suburban London with amateur orchestras and choral societies while I was at school (just as I first performed the Bach Passions, far from the HIP performances of my later “career”).

From Ruth Finnegan, The hidden musicians (1989).

I went on to play the German Requiem at Cambridge—where a group of us liked to stagger back from the pub to be amazed by Barenboim’s 1972 LP, with the LPO and the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, Edith Mathis and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau:

concluding here (followed by the Vier Ernste Gesänge): *

By the time I was playing professionally in London, the Requiem had (sadly) become a rather routine experience, with (happily) minimal rehearsal (cf. Ecstasy and drudge), a bread-and-butter gig akin to doing a Messiah in Scunthorpe.

I write this post because until quite recently I felt twice removed from such works—after all those years in the early music business, with the further distraction of becoming immersed in Chinese fieldwork, I might expect to have grown out of such romantic warhorses. But somehow early bonds remain deep.

* * *

Klemperer’s 1961 recording is widely praised, with the Philharmonia Chorus and Orchestra, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau:

After this recording of Mengelberg’s 1940 concert (with the Concertgebouw and Amsterdam Toonkunst Choir, Jo Vincent and Max Kloos), here’s Furtwängler in 1948, with the Stockholm Phil and Chorus, Kerstin Lindberg-Torlind and Bernhard Sönnerstedt:

and Celibidache, live in 1981 with the Munich Phil and Choir, Arleen Auger and Franz Gerihsen:

In 1984 Tennstedt made two recordings with the LPO and Choir—a studio recording with Jessye Norman and Jorma Hynninen:

and a live performance from the Proms, with Lucia Popp and Thomas Allen:

As the early music movement became flavour of the month (see here), musos like me, who had washed up on the shores of baroque music as a refuge from the stormy seas of symphony orchestras, again found themselves playing some of the same pieces from the mainstream repertoire—now re-invigorated by a notional cachet of “authenticity”.

I was glad to revisit the German requiem for John Eliot Gardiner’s first recording of the work in 1990, with the ORR and the unmatchable Monteverdi Choir, Charlotte Margiono and Rodney Gilfry:

For Gardiner’s second recording (with Katharine Fuge and Matthew Brook, recorded in 2007–08), click here.

Assessing the balance between intense and ponderous will be subjective, depending on one’s own reception history and degree of veneration for particular maestros (note The art of conducting). Now, I’m keen on slow tempi, emphasised by most conductors here; but I find the choices of Furtwängler or Barenboim far more convincing than those of Celibidache—though FWIW, among the singers, I am moved by Celi’s team of Arleen Auger and Franz Gerihsen.

Anyway, it’s taken me all this time to feel blessed (selig) by the soul of Brahms. **

Among a wide range of scholarship, see e.g. chapter 5 “Performance issues in A German Requiem” of Performing Brahms: early evidence of performance style, cited in Brahms, tempo and timbre. See also Hélène Grimaud‘s renditions of the piano concertos; Der englische gruß—and *don’t miss* Kleiber’s Brahms 2!!! Try also the Mozart Requiem, and Funeral music. For other forays into later early music, cf. Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Roméo et Juliette, the Four sacred pieces of Verdi, and even The Rite of Spring.

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* which sounds more, well, serious, than “Four serious songs” (cf. Richard Strauss, here and here). Cf. What is serious music?!.

** It’s always worth consulting Slonimsky’s Lexicon of musical invective for withering reviews of the day. George Bernard Shaw in 1892:

Brahms’s Requiem has not the true funeral relish: it is so execrably and ponderously dull that the very flattest of funerals would seem like a ballet, or at least a danse macabre, after it.

Philip Hale in 1900:

Page after page of his Requiem is saturated with indigo woe, and the consolatory words are set to music that is too often dull with unutterable dullness.

Cf. More musical criticism.