The 2012 Festival Chorus Concert will be:
7.30 pm Friday July 6th, 2012
in Chester Cathedral
Johannes Brahms A German Requiem
Sophie Bevan Soprano
Andrew Foster-
Chester Festival Chorus
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
Vasily Petrenko Conductor
Ticket information to follow
Johannes Brahms -
Brahms's mother died in February 1865, a loss that painfully grieved him and that may well have inspired Ein deutsches Requiem. What is less certain is whether his lingering feelings over Robert Schumann's death in July 1856 may also have contributed to the work’s genesis. By the end of April 1865, Brahms had completed the first, second, and fourth movements. The second movement used some previously abandoned musical material written in 1854, the year of Schumann's mental collapse and attempted suicide and of Brahms's move to Düsseldorf to assist Clara Schumann and her seven children.
Brahms had completed all but what is now the fifth movement by August 1866. Johannes Herbeck conducted the first three movements in Vienna on 1 December 1867. This partial première went poorly owing to a misunderstanding by the timpanist of a marking in his score, so that sections marked as pf were played as f or ff, essentially drowning out the rest of the ensemble in the fugal section of the third movement. The first performance of the six movements was given in Bremen Cathedral on Good Friday, 10 April 1868, with Brahms conducting and Julius Stockhausen as the baritone soloist. The performance was a great success and marked a turning point in the composer’s career.
Brahms added the fifth movement (“Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit”) in May 1868. It was
first sung in Zurich on 12 September 1868, by Ida Suter-
Brahms assembled the libretto to Ein deutsches Requiem himself. He eschewed the traditional Latin text of the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass, choosing instead to set passages of the German Luther Bible. The sources include Psalms, Isaiah, Ecclesiastes, the Gospels of St Matthew and St John, the First Epistle to the Corinthians, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and Revelation.
Brahms’s first known use of the title A German Requiem was in an 1865 letter to Clara Schumann in which he wrote that he intended for the piece to be “a sort of German Requiem”. Brahms was quite moved when he found out years later that Robert Schumann had planned a work of the same name. German refers primarily to the language rather than to the intended audience. Brahms told Karl Martin Reinthaler, director of music at Bremen Cathedral, that he would gladly have called the work A Human Requiem instead.
Made by Serif
