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By Root 1388 0

spaces of the cathedral the first movement unfolded, mostly quiet, its immense subtlety wrapped in noble simplicity. The style is at once utterly Brahmsian and in its gentle sweetness unlike anything he wrote before or after. At the same time it is suffused with the history of German religious music, back through Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis through Mozart and Haydn to Bach and Handel, beyond that a century earlier to the austere gravity of Heinrich Schütz, and back further to the German and Italian polyphonists of the Renaissance.76 As in Schütz, the music of the Requiem seems to rise directly from the German of Luther’s Bible: Selig sind, die da Leid tragen, denn sie sollen getröstet werden. The music gives voice to the spirit of those words, which return at the end of the first movement distilled to their essence: getröstet werden, be comforted.

There would have been a pause in Bremen Cathedral, the audience rustling, turning their texts. They looked to the little figure of Brahms on the podium, giving one of his awkward but forceful upbeats to begin the second movement. Even before the choir enters, this music is unmistakably a funeral sarabande, as it had been when Brahms first sketched it in the days after Robert Schumann leaped into the Rhine.77 The dark minor of the themes is counterpoised by pealing, Bachlike high chords of strings and winds, and beneath it all the fateful and relentless pounding of drums. In stark octaves the voices enter on a Brahmsian Dies Irae: Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen wie des Grases Blumen: For all flesh it is as grass and every splendor of men like the grasses’ bloom. Then the gentle answering phrase, the grass has withered, and the flowers fallen. A contrasting moment evokes patience, then the funeral march returns, building to something near despair before the radiant answer: But the Lord’s word endures forever … and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. If the beginning evokes the Gothic severity of Schütz, the end recalls Beethoven’s Ode to Joy: Freude! Freude! Freude! They shall find joy!

Julius Stockhausen stood to intone the opening of the third movement: Lord, make me to know my end, and the measure of my days. Choir and soloist exchange the chastening words of scripture, Surely every man walks in a vain show … he heaps up riches, and knows not who shall gather them. Yet for Brahms this work ends not in despair but in joy, consolation, quietness—here the pealing fugue over the fixed pedal point of certainty in the bass, But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God and no torment shall touch them.

Then came How lovely is thy dwelling place, O Lord of Hosts, as apparently artless as a folk song. Many of the listeners were in tears now. Certainly Clara was. Sitting in the church with thousands at her back, seeing nothing but the musicians and that maddening, beloved genius on the podium, she felt that Johannes was with a magic wand calling masses of instruments and voices together in a great work, and so at last her husband’s prophecy in “Neue Bahnen” had been fulfilled. In her depression of that time, for all the tragedies of her family and the troubles between her and Johannes over the years and never more than now, Clara wrote in her journal of that day, “It was such a joy as I have not felt for a long time.”78 They were two much-wounded people for whom music could heal everything, and that lay at the heart of their relationship.

The fifth (later sixth) movement began, with its dark colors and old/new harmonies, on Now we have here no dwelling place but seek the one to come. Nearly everyone in Bremen Cathedral was inside the music now, sensing that this work would not let them down but sustain its uncanny aura of grace to the end. This movement, with its simple rhythms and quiet plainspokenness, displays one of the main driving forces of the Requiem: harmonies at once archaic and fresh, piercingly expressive with every turn. The movement ends with a grand fugue on Handelian verses and, for the first time, with Handel as its manifest