Brahms Ein deutsches Requiem

Back Bay Chorale presents Johannes Brahms's uplifting  Ein deutsches Requiem.

Friday, May 6, 2022 • 8:00 p.m.
Sanders Theatre, Harvard University • Cambridge   

Back Bay Chorale and Orchestra
Maya Bloom, soprano
Ryne Cherry, baritone
Scott Allen Jarrett conducting

The Bridges  ESL Chorus  (in partnership with the Boston Public Library) is singing  on the stage at 7:40 p.m., before the concert. Check out  WBZ NewsRadio 1030's report  on the chorus.

All attendees must be masked at all times, per Sanders Theatre's policies.

Sanders Theatre COVID Guidelines >

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Comfort for the Living

Brahms's humanist masterpiece continues to provide comfort and hope

On February 2, 1865, Johannes Brahms received an urgent telegram from his brother Fritz: “If you want to see our mother once again, come immediately.” Their mother, Christiane Brahms, had suffered a stroke. Brahms, in Vienna at the time, rushed back home to Hamburg,  but he was too late. The loss of his mother affected the composer profoundly, and he soon began composing  Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem).

Though the death of his mother was likely the immediate catalyst for the work, it's also possible that the idea for it originated after the death of his mentor, Robert Schumann, nine years earlier. It was, of course, Schumann who had made the unknown Brahms famous by declaring him Beethoven's musical heir in a widely-circulated publication. Many in the musical world had yet to be  swayed by that bold proclamation.  Ein deutsches Requiem  would do the convincing.

A private man, Brahms gave no indication of whose memorial the  Requiem  might be, or, for that matter, where his personal religious beliefs lay. But the universal message of its vision transcends the circumstances of its conception. Brahms’s stated intention was to write a requiem to comfort the living, not one to plea for the souls of the dead. As such, the text of his  Requiem  has little in common with the traditional Catholic, Latin Mass that had been employed by Mozart and others. He compiled the text himself from both Old and New Testaments and from the Apocrypha, and the work focuses on faith in the Resurrection, rather than the horrors of the Day of Judgment.

The choice was a bold one, and not without controversy. Indeed, after the conductor of the Bremen premiere expressed concern that the  Requiem  omitted any reference to Jesus, Brahms responded by writing that “As far as the text is concerned, I will confess that I would very gladly omit the ‘German’ as well, and simply put ‘of Mankind,’ also quite deliberately and consciously do without passages such as John 3:16.” The clergy of the Bremen cathedral insisted on presenting more doctrinally sound music after the  Requiem  was first performed there. But despite its unorthodox text, Brahms's  Requiem  was immediately recognised as a masterpiece of exceptional vision, and it finally confirmed Brahms’s reputation as a composer of international stature.

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How to get there

Harvard Square T
Sanders Theatre is located at 45 Quincy St, Cambridge—just a 10 minute walk from the T in Harvard Square. 

Free Parking
Free parking is provided at Harvard's Broadway Garage, at the corner of Felton and Broadway. Enter Felton Street (one-way) from Cambridge St. Allow 10 minutes to park and walk to Sanders. Tell the attendant that you are attending a function at Sanders Theatre.

Soloists