The Well-Tempered Ear

Classical music: Why is Brahms’ “German” Requiem so great? Ask the American poet Emily Dickinson.

By Jacob Stockinger

Great musical works, like great poems, get analyzed and  eventually overanalyzed. Yet they still stand and endure and continue to speak to us and to move us and make us think. That is why they are masterpieces.

So just maybe we can use one masterpiece to discuss another – counterparts in beauty, as it were, or “correspondences” to use French poet Charles Baudelaire’s term. After all, poets and musicians seem to have a lot in common.

Let me be specific. I have in mind the “German” Requiem, Op. 45, by Johannes Brahms (1833-1897, below).

I could talk about the two outstanding performances of the 75-minute “German” Requiem that I heard this past weekend. I could mention how robustly and, at the same time,  subtly the University of Wisconsin  Symphony Orchestra played under conductor Beverly Taylor (below left).

I could praise how the choral parts, as performed by the campus and community UW Choral Union (below top), brought so many degrees of shading and dynamics to convey the mood and meaning of the text. I could single out how the undergraduate soloists, baritone Benjamin Li (below middle) and soprano Olivia Pogodzinski (below bottom), stood out for their full, strong voices.

But something deeper and more elusive haunts one about this music. And if it didn’t, would I perceive the music as so great?

We have a long history together, the Brahms “German” Requiem and me.

I first sang it when I was 14 or 15.

Since then it has remained for is one of the greatest pieces of music. I see it as the greatest choral work ever in part because it is more a secular humanist work rather than a religious one, and because the Scriptural texts seem so universal. Plus, the work feels so perfect in how carefully it is composed and written, for both voices and instruments. It feels so spontaneous and heart-felt, yet it is also so crafted and well thought-out. It is a perfect blending of the heart-felt and the analytical, the personal and the objective.

For a long time I have played the “German” Requiem to privately mourn the deaths of family members, friends and even the sadness of world events. This year too it once again holds special meaning for me. (And for others too, since these performances were dedicated to UW Professor Emeritus David Schrieber, who sang with the UW Choral Union for more than 40 years and recently died.)

But what words could really do justice to this great work with its sweeping melodies; its alternating drama and lyricism; its mix of Classicism and Romanticism; with its using  counterpoint and fugues both to offset and to enhance its soaring melodic lines and rich harmonies? (At bottom is Movement 6 with baritone soloist Dietrich Fischer Dieskau.)

I wondered.

Then I found the right words – not from me but from a great artist who lived closer in time to Brahms and who seems to share his sensibility and whose work even follows the same as the “German” Requiem.

The words come from one of those short and sometimes cryptic, but deeply moving poems by the 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886, below, in a daguerreotype photograph from 1846) –- and it is absolutely worthy of Johannes Brahms and his “German” Requiem:

AFTER GREAT PAIN, A FORMAL FEELING COMES

By Emily Dickinson

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –

The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’

And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –

A Wooden way

Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –

Regardless grown,

A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons recollect the Snow –

First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

As Brahms’ text , drawn from  “Revelations,” says in the last movement: “Their works live on after them.”

Do you also think the poem captures some or even much of the Brahms?

Do other poems or passages of literature come to mind when you think of the Brahms?

And what did you think of the performances this past weekend?

The Ear wants to hear.

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