This piece doesn’t just start, it takes you straight to heaven. You get up there quickly, take off your coat and take a seat on a cloud. Then a choir rises, as if out of nowhere: “Blessed are those who suffer because they should be comforted.”
Johannes Brahms (1833 – 1897), German major composer of high romanticism and insidious dog, knew exactly what he was up to. The quoted line at the beginning of his German Requiem comes from the evangelist Matthäus, and it is performed in a deceptive F major, a kind of enticing chant that instantly lets you soften. Brahms demonstrates expertly, he gently points the way towards sentimentality – because even at this beginning there is a shudder, a not so happy message: In a moment, my friend, you will cry.
Lyrically and musically, it is pleasantly painful and precisely crafted, just as nothing is left to chance in Brahms’ greatest composition. The word “blessed” navigates one internally immediately into the realm of the dead, but immediately suffering is borne in the present tense and worldly consolation is at least promised, if not promised. The place on the cloud, already beyond the earth, but still at the gateway to heaven, is exactly the right one. Unfortunately, it can also be said today that Johannes Brahms had nothing less to premiere with the German Requiem 150 years ago than the soundtrack for the horrific Corona winter of 2021/2022.
Despite the internet, speed limit and Biontech / Pfizer, it’s still like this: We will all die
First, however, decency recommends, it should be remembered that this Requiem was a world sensation long before Corona. The critic Eduard Hanslick judged the then 33-year-old Brahms that since Bach’s B minor Mass and Beethoven’s Missa solemnis nothing has been written of even remotely similar rank. The composer Clara Schumann, who was the first confidante to see an early score of the initially six-movement Requiem, wrote back to Brahms that this was “a very powerful piece”, that it “gripped the whole person in a way that little else did.”
Why was that like that? For Schumann it was “deep seriousness, combined with all the magic of poetry”; in unity of action, seriousness and poetry seemed to her like an aggressive designer drug, “wonderful, shocking and soothing”. Why is that still the case today? Because, despite all the love for the Internet, speed limit and Biontech / Pfizer, the essence of being human has not changed much in 150 years. The essence of being human is that one dies at some point. This fact is basically known, yet it is bone-chilling when left unused.
Life is finite – and the living need consolation whenever people die in their vicinity. In all likelihood it was the death of his mother that was decisive, well, “motivated” Brahms in completing his Requiem, and yet it did not turn out to be a classical mass for the dead. Rather, the Requiem is the ingenious attempt to amalgamate grief with consolation, if not to let both storm and shine, sometimes in rapid alternations. And sometimes sadness and consolation not only alternate, but become one. If you wrote this text in English, you would leave one in the description of such moments mourning sun rise, a sun of sorrow.
What was new on the surface of the experience was a small number of helpers
In any case, this Requiem is a high mass for many people, an example of which can be observed every year on the day of national mourning in front of and in the Dresden Kreuzkirche. It was always the case there that, while standing in line outside the door for far too long, the strange human lemmings began to establish a bond with one another of a higher order. It was always the case there that death sat next to hundreds of living people in the bank and that with a serious estimate of the average age of the audience one could never be sure whether the incomparable depth of collective silent devotion after the last note of the seventh act for individuals would not extend.
This year, however, a lot was different than usual and what exactly can only be fully understood in retrospect. What was new on the surface of the experience was a small vaccination series of helpers who walked down the queues of those waiting in order to highlight a bright green cross on the respective ticket after the check. The cross choir, which was rearranged in rank for reasons of distance instead of on a stage traverse, had to work differently, which was also deprived of the extra voices that were otherwise bought for power play.
Above all, the well-known piece had a different effect in depth – in a year in which mourning is no longer a purely private matter.
Anyone who starts looking for the links to the epidemic cannot stop here
It is like this: The epidemic is measured daily in real time in documentations and stories, and its consequences are recorded with cool mathematical cruelty not only to the digit, but also in so-called Corona dashboards. For all Weltschmerz everyone had and still has their own coping and, above all, denial strategies. In the past two years, however, the encounter with death and ruin has left the category of the occasional. Death has descended to us from the sphere of the almost always abstract, it has become a daily negotiated fact, which is marked as extraordinary on some days by the fact that it is not reported together with the weather and the stock market, but only just before it .
The soul has to hang after this sudden omnipresence of suffering. But it does her good if she is ventilated a little now, in the third year of the epidemic, with Brahms and his Requiem. This still consists of verses from the Old and New Testaments, arranged as cleverly as one might expect from a man who knew the Scriptures better than he liked to go to church in blunt piety to find another listening to a bad sermon.
These verses are of great general validity. But anyone who negligently begins to look for connections to the great epidemic of our time in a performance of the Requiem will soon be unable to stop at all. “Because all meat, it’s like grass,” goes the famous B flat minor choir in the second movement – and especially in the image of the wide area that is withering, the death of so many can become more understandable than as a number in a statistic.
“See, my days are a hand’s breadth in front of you”, the almost impotent solo baritone becomes aware in the third movement in an appeal to the Almighty. With the following “they collect and don’t know who will get it” at the latest one sees aerosols flying through the church in a little delusion, where only the senselessness of worldly property is to be explained. It goes on like this until the firestorm in the sixth movement, an endgame in which there is – despair! – apparently there is nothing more to lose than one last beat of the heart: “Death, where is your sting? Hell, where is your victory?”
Corona death has extended its sting more than 100,000 times in Germany so far. And the Brahms Requiem is also the soundtrack of this time because this firestorm is also followed by praise without any seam. At the end of the Corinthians it goes to the Revelation of St. John, and for the visitors not only to the Kreuzkirche it goes back out into the only temporarily gloomy world, because somehow it always goes on for everyone who has not yet been fetched.
Consolation often consists in the experience of being able to give space to death without being crushed by it. Be it the death of a love, that of a friendship, or that of a vast number of people. This consolation can be found in Brahms – and sometimes even something like cheerfulness.