May 5-6, 2012 NCS Performs Brahms’ Requiem

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May 5-6, 2012 The Newburyport Choral Society brings the much loved  Brahms’  Requiem to the community. This promises to be a spectacular event that is as much a pleasure for the chorus as it is for the audience. This beautiful piece promises to be memorable long after the concert on May 5-6, 2012 has ended.

Johannes Brahms: Requiem, Opus 45

Completed in 1868 when he was 35 years old, this work established Brahms’ reputation as a composer and is one of his greatest works.  Brahms may have had his friend Robert Schumann in mind when he began the Requiem, but he surely was thinking of his own mother, who died in 1865, by the time he finished the work. It is interesting to note that two greatest sorrows of his life up to that time, his master and friend Schumann, and his mother, are both here memorialized. Unlike liturgical requiems, Brahms’ German Requiem offers no prayers for the dead, takes its text directly from the Bible, and is sung in the vernacular, in this instance, English, not Latin.

The text, selected and organized by Brahms himself, speaks solely to the living, to those who mourn. Brahms expressed his willingness, on one occasion, to change the title to “A Human Requiem,” but he held firm that the words should not reflect any orthodoxy, but his understanding, his own personal theology.

Musically, we have a very specialized cycle of accompanied part-songs. The movements follow the form of their texts, just as his songs do. In this case, however, because of the scale of the composition, what might be small touches in a part-song become magnificent  large gestures. Think of the grim funeral process, which opens Movement II, or the glowing conclusion to that same movement! The great fugue, which closes Movement VI is the perfect counterpoint to the uneasy mystery with which it begins. And finally, the last chorus takes its theme from a motive heard in the first chorus. Even further, Brahms finally quotes, in the last chorus, the music, which ended the first chorus, bringing the work full circle in such a way that those who find comfort (Movement I) share the same music with those, finally, who die in the Lord.


Author: ncsadmin

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