jan 1, 1868 - Ein deutsches Requiem

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It is ironic that Brahms--who nver wrote an opera and who was hailed for his role in reviving the symphony--gained his first real fame as a composer of choral music. It was, however, a time-honored road to success for German composers. given teh country's many singing societies and summer festivals. Brahsm led an amateur chorus in Detmold, followed by one in Hamburg, and his first major appointment in Vienna was as director of one of the city's main choral societies. Much of his repertory with the group concentrated on a cappella and continuou-accompanied literature, and in the process he discovered a wealth of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century music, particularly by Heinrich Schutz and other early German masters up to JS Bach, whose choral works were then only then beginning to be published. He became an enthusiast of these early works, sought out its leading musical scholars, and actually engaged in some musicological work of his own. Brahms made many arrangements of early German choral music and helped prepare editions of music by Couperin, Handel, CPE Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, and others.

Brahms's choral masterpiece, Ein deutsches REquiem (A German Requiem, 1868) , is not a liturgical work. It is a deeply personal setting--inspired in part by the death of his mother--of selected passages from Martin Luther's translation of the Bible that deal with consolation, acceptance of fate, and transcendence of suffering through love. As a piece composed by a Protestant but meant for performance throughout the German-speaking lands, it continued the ecumenical Mendelssohnian tradition of using music to unite the reliigously divided German-speaking peoples. Fugal writing abounds in it, and there are many passages that bear traces of older music.

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