Festival '25 will be held February 16, 2025 at 3:00 p.m. We will be returning to a former venue, Bluff Park United Methodist Church, 733 Valley St., Birmingham, AL 35226. This season the Festival chorus and orchestra is pleased to offer A German Requiem, Op. 45, by Johannes Brahms, which we will present in English. Mr. James A. Brown, Director of Music at Independent Presbyterian Church, Memphis and our first clinician in 2009, as well as 2011 and 2015 will conduct this beloved work. A pre-concert lecture will begin at 2:00 p.m., and as usual there is no admission fee.
Brahms wrote his seven-movement Requiem not as an address to the dead but to comfort the living:
“Blessed,” begins A German Requiem [“Blessed are they that mourn”]. At the end of its journey the music comes to rest on the word “blessed.” The first blessing is for the living, the last for those who are gone, who rest from their labors. These first words foreshadow the purpose of the Requiem, and its progression from darkness to light.
The second movement [“Behold all flesh is as the grass”] is an evocation of death that ends in joy. It begins as a heavy and mournful dance of death as it had been when Brahms first sketched it in the days after Robert Schumann’s plunge into the Rhine. A contrasting peaceful section is overtaken by a funeral march, building to a kind of all-consuming anguish before the radiant answer.
In the third movement [“Lord, make me to know”] the word “I” first appears, the text a picture of despair that will be answered by certainty. Yet this movement ends again in joy and consolation.
Next an interlude in the form of an artless, sublime folk song on the image of the heavenly home, repeating over and over, [“How lovely is thy dwelling place, O Lord of Hosts.”]
In the fifth movement [“Ye now are sorrowful”] the solo soprano’s central words evoke the assurance of hope and the memory of Brahms' mother, Christiane Brahms: “I will comfort you as one whom his own mother comforts.”
The sixth movement brings dark colors and old/new harmonies to the hope of rebirth: [“Here on earth we have no continuing place.”] In this image of resurrection Brahms put in the last trumpet but left out the terror of last judgement. The movement ends with a grand fugue on Handelian verses. This movement is the climax of the Requiem, ending with Handelian kettledrums.
The music of the finale [“Blessed are the dead”] is full and rich but not showy, with the same lyrical sweetness, the same limpid austerity that the Requiem possesses from its beginning. “Blessed are they that mourn,” the Requiem 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, “blessed”—the dead blessed not in Paradise but in the hearts of the living.
(* Thanks to the Boston Symphony Orchestra website for the text to this synopsis.)
If you are interested in performing this beloved work with us, please click here for more information.