Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [211]
The music of the finale is full and rich but not showy. It is a finale with the same lyrical sweetness, the same austerity, humility, and limpid ecstasy that the Requiem possesses from its opening measures. It ends gently as the work began, without Beethovenian perorations or Handelian kettledrums, but with submission to the inevitable, a peace not of paradise but of deepest rest. Blessed are they that mourn, the work begins. It ends, Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: Yea, said the Spirit, they rest from their labors. With a radiant gentleness the music dies away on its opening word: selig, blessed.
The audience appears to have left Bremen Cathedral that Good Friday in an atmosphere of awe and grace. Perhaps they suspected they had been present at the birth of something that would live long in music and in the heart of humanity. A more direct response came when a visitor, having sat in tears throughout and watched Clara, Joachim, and a good many others weeping, discovered Johann Jakob Brahms taking a pinch of snuff outside. The visitor asked what he had thought of this effort by his son. “It didn’t sound bad,” the old man said, with a sniff that may have been from the tobacco.
After the performance a large party retired to the Bremen Rathskeller to celebrate. The Joachims and Dietrichs and Stockhausens and Grimms were there, with Max Bruch and Clara Schumann and daughter Marie, the women from the Hamburg Frauenchor, and as many others as could squeeze into the old restaurant. Reinthaler gave the formal speech, including:
What we have heard today is a great and beautiful work, deep and intense in feeling, ideal and lofty in conception. Yes, one may well call it an epoch-making work!… It was an anxious, a sad and melancholy time we endured when we laid to rest the last beloved Master [meaning Schumann]; it almost seemed as if the night had come. But today … we can predict that the followers of that great master will complete what he began.… I know that you all rejoice with me in the fact that we have the author of this splendid work sitting amongst us, and you will willingly drink with me to the health of the composer—Brahms!
Everyone responded in his and her style—some applauding, some cheering, Clara sobbing. Brahms rose dutifully but said only,
If I allow myself now to say a couple of words, I must preface them with the remark that I have not the gift of speech at my command. But there are so many in this company to whom I would like to say a word of thanks … and especially that applies to my honored friend Reinthaler, who has devoted himself with tireless zeal to the study of my Requiem. Therefore I lay my thanks for all at his feet, and call for three cheers for Herr Reinthaler!79
Afterward he pressed Clara to stay for another day. “I wish I had not given in to him,” she wrote in her journal. In the morning they quarreled, she left town in tears. Without even fully understanding the causes, of which Julie was the secret one, they were heading toward a crisis neither of them could foresee. Brahms retired to Hamburg and his father’s house for six weeks, there to follow Eduard Marxsen’s advice and write a soprano solo to add to the Requiem as fifth movement. If the work in his own mind was written in memory of both Robert Schumann and his mother, in this last music for the Requiem he evokes unforgettably the memory of Christiane Brahms: I will comfort you as one whom his mother comforts.
At its premiere the Requiem found success that relatively few works and composers have ever achieved by the beginning of middle age. Carl Dahlhaus calls the Requiem, as an individual confession of faith, “one of those works in which the 19th century recognized its own identity.”80 Reinthaler repeated the work in Bremen