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By Root 1431 0

and put down useful remarks. I should like that very much. The eternal ‘D’ in No. 3. If I don’t use the organ it doesn’t sound [well].… There is much I should like to ask.”60 (After the Bremen premiere Marxsen would advise his still-respectful pupil to add a fifth movement for soprano solo, and that suggestion Brahms accepted.) It is no surprise that the manuscript shows Brahms making the most extensive revisions in the fugue with “the eternal D.” He tried to head off future timpani disasters by adding to the part the elaborate expression piano ma ben marcato, soft but well-marked. Originally the whole fugue had been fully scored; now he returned to the manuscript and struck out wide swaths of instrumental doublings, trying to provide contrast and climax by holding back a tutti until the end.61 In that form the world came to know the fugue—improved but still troublesome, arguably the largest miscalculation Brahms ever let stand in a work of his maturity.

When Dietrich showed Karl Reinthaler the score, the Bremen music director enthusiastically offered his forces for the full premiere. It was set for the following year’s Good Friday in Bremen Cathedral. Rheinthaler agreed to conduct most of the rehearsals—some three months’ worth—with his choir, then hand them over to Brahms for the final polish and performance.

In the middle of January 1868, Brahms went for a stay in Hamburg, partly to visit family and do some performing, partly to be near Bremen, where Reinthaler was starting rehearsals for the Requiem. While there he joined with Julius Stockhausen and the Philharmonic in Beethoven’s G Major Concerto and soloed in the Schumann Symphonic Études, plus conducting some of his own orchestral arrangements of Schubert songs, with Stockhausen soloing. It was Brahms’s first appearance in six years with the orchestra that had spurned him twice, and his last for a decade more.

During what turned out to be a remarkable collaboration for the premiere of Ein deutsches Requiem, Brahms and Reinthaler had only one recorded disagreement. Besides being a respected conductor, organist, and composer, Reinthaler had studied theology. One detail of the Requiem rather troubled his religious sensibility: somehow the piece never gets around to mentioning Jesus Christ. Reinthaler wrote Brahms an earnest and carefully reasoned entreaty to address this little oversight.

Forgive me, but I wondered if it might not be possible to extend the work in some way that would bring it closer to a Good Friday service.… In this composition you stand not only on religious but also certainly on Christian ground. The second movement, for example, touches on the prophecy of the Lord’s return, and in the penultimate movement the mystery of the resurrection of the dead.… But what is lacking, at least for a Christian consciousness, is the pivotal point: the salvation in the death of our Lord. “If Christ is not raised, your faith is vain,” said St. Paul in connection with a passage you used. Now it would be easy to find, near “O death, where is thy sting,” a suitable place.…62

He continued, in high theological mode.

Brahms was not about to put up with that sort of thing. He was a humanist and an agnostic, and his requiem was going to express that, Reinthaler or no. Fix oder nix, as the old Frauenchor motto ran—up to the mark or nothing. With the title A German Requiem he intended to convey that this is not the liturgical requiem mass in Latin, nor a German translation of it, but a personal testament, a requiem. Brahms avoided dogma in the piece for the same reason. He fashioned an inwardly spiritual work, full of echoes of religious music going back hundreds of years, yet there is no bowing to the altar or smell of incense in it. Even if the words come from the Bible, this was his response to death as a secular, skeptical, modern man. Brahms responded to Reinthaler politely but unequivocally:

As far as the text is concerned, I confess that I would gladly omit even the word German and instead use Human; also with my best knowledge and will I would dispense with