Death and Johannes Brahms
- The Singer of Homesickness
On April 3, 1897, in the little street of Karlsgasse in Vienna, Austria, death finally caught up with Johannes Brahms. Death had been on his trail for a long time. Brahms dealt with the subject of death as hardly any other musician had — at least in his major choral works.¹ He neither feared death, nor did he long for it, although his music has been called “death-addicted.”²
Even though death as a topic occupied him for a long time, it was actually not death that troubled him, but life. Upon the birth of a son to his friend Joseph Joachim, he wrote, “One can no longer wish him the best — not to have been born at all!”³ In his Four Serious Songs, Brahms chose for one of them a verse from the book of Ecclesiastes, “I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive, but better than both is he who has not yet been….”⁴ In one of his letters to Clara Schumann after the death of her husband Robert, Brahms came to the surprising conclusion about life and death, “Life robs one more than death does.”⁵
Brahms sometimes had suicidal thoughts. When only 23 years old, he compared himself to the main character in Goethe’s Werther, who committed suicide after having his love repudiated.⁶ In 1855–56 he also thought of suicide when his relationship with Clara Schumann before — and especially after — Robert’s death went through a passionate escalation. However, he was always driven by seemingly contradictory longings that were expressed in all of his music: longing for rewarding relationships and at the same time for freedom; longing for recognition and employment and at the same time for free disposal over his time; and longing for a safe place, for rest, for home and, again, for non-attachment. Brahms has been called the “singer of homesickness.”⁷
2. Homeless Brahms
Brahms was born on May 7, 1833, in a poor district of Hamburg’s Old Town, and would have liked to remain in his native city his whole life. He was a loyal son of his hometown. However, Hamburg did not want him. In the very same year of 1858, as his father was finally accepted as a double bass player in the Philharmonic Orchestra, the application of his son Johannes for the position of conductor (Kapellmeister) of this orchestra was rejected. The treatment of great composers by the city of Hamburg is somewhat tragic: Handel, Bach, Brahms, Mahler — they all were rejected.
The wound that Brahms received here was not just that of injured vanity. Hamburg was home for him, and so the rejection felt almost like a parental withdrawal of love. “I am not a cosmopolitan,” Brahms wrote to Clara Schumann, “but I am attached to my native city as to a mother. (…) How rare is a permanent place for such as us, how I would have liked to have found it in my hometown. Now here” — he writes from Vienna — “where I enjoy so much that is positive, I feel, and will always feel, that I am a stranger and have no peace.”⁸ He suffered, as he said elsewhere, “a little from old-fashioned homesickness.”⁹
The search for such a “permanent place” was one of the lasting and driving motives in the life of Brahms, who for many years was without a permanent residence. This was an ambivalent pattern for him. His search for permanence and security went hand-in-hand with his flight from attachment and from settling down, not only in his relationship with Clara Schumann (he was the one to insist on separation!), but also a little later with the Göttingen professor’s daughter Agathe von Siebold. As soon as they had exchanged engagement rings (in 1858), Brahms wrote immediately: “I love you! I need to see you again! But I cannot stand chains.…”¹⁰
In two of his greater works and several of his songs, Brahms dealt with the theme of being unhappy and lost. For him, it was not just a tragedy of his personal life, but a constitutive part of being human. This is especially clear in a line from his Song of Destiny: “To us is allotted no restful haven to find,” also in his German Requiem, “For here we have no continuing city,” and in the title of his song “No House, no Home” (Kein Haus, keine Heimat, op. 94, №5).
For his Song of Destiny, Brahms took its text from Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem with the same title. It is based textually and musically on the contrast between the divine and the human, between above and below, between heaven and earth. Above are the gods, “in the light, immortal, eternally flourishing, in silent eternal clarity.” Below are the humans, “without resting place, dwindling, falling, suffering, blind, in the unknown.” Brahms imitated this contrast in his music: the dimension of the divine, relieved of all tension, is represented in a pure hovering chord (violins con sordini!) in E flat major. The choir sings this passage like an anthem. It is contrasted with the human condition, represented in brusque diminished chords and violent abrupt movement in orchestra and choir: the “falling from cliff to cliff,” the restlessness, the being thrown, the transience, the “below” of the grave — all are audible in the music.
The two worlds are irreconcilable: the divine does not participate in the human condition, and the God who cannot suffer cannot feel compassion. However, Brahms went beyond Hölderlin’s text. He did not end with the “below” of the grave, as Hölderlin did, but ended in the sphere of the “heavenly.” The music returns there wordlessly; it is the vanishing point of Brahms’ yearning: “I simply say something the poet does not say,” he wrote in a letter at the time.¹¹ And it is not by coincidence that he instructs the performers above the first score line: “lento e languido — slowly and yearningly.”
This peculiar feeling of homelessness can be found explicitly in the song op. 94.5:
No house, no home,
No wife, no child,
Thus I whirl, like a straw,
In weather and wind.
The homeless existence, its brokenness and fragmentation, is quite impressively expressed in Brahms’ music. This song is one of the shortest and coldest songs by Brahms — it hardly lasts 30 seconds.
For most of his life, Brahms felt like an outsider and a loner. Besides in a number of songs like “I creep about” (Ich schleich umher, op. 32.3), or “Solitude in the Fields” (Feldeinsamkeit , op. 86.2), this feeling is strongly reflected in Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody (for alto solo and men’s chorus) after a poem by Goethe. It begins:
But who stands there apart?
In the thicket, lost is his path
Behind him the bushes
Are closing together,
The grass springs up again;
The desert engulfs him.Ah, who’ll heal his afflictions,
To whom balsam was poison,
Who, from love’s fullness,
Drank in misanthropy only?¹²
The opening chord is a musical symbol of estrangement: a dissonance that cannot be easily classified within the major-minor system of music.
This work is based on a deep disappointment. In 1869 Brahms had fallen in love with the 24-year-old daughter of Clara Schumann, Julie, but as usual had hidden his feelings so completely that the Schumann house planned Julie’s engagement with another man without suspecting in any way what that might mean to Brahms. Shortly after this engagement, Brahms presented the Rhapsody to Clara as “his bridal song” for Julie.
Goethe concluded his poem with the image of the “thirsty man in the desert.” Brahms reinterpreted the text — and so does his music which, in tension with the gloomy opening in C minor, reflects a mood of resolution and reconciliation, ending in C major. Brahms concluded his work with the men’s chorus singing a prayer to God (here from the middle part of the poem):
If there be, on thy psaltery,
Father of Love, but one tone
That to his ear may be pleasing,
Oh, then, quicken his heart!
Brahms’ loneliness was always one of longing, not of bitterness.¹³ His paradoxical experience of loneliness — yearning for relationships and simultaneously fleeing from attachment — he once summarized thus: “Unfortunately, thank God, I am still unmarried!”¹⁴ Occasionally, he looked longingly for a satisfying family life (such as Schumanns’), but he also knew the price: “It is good fortune to have family, to live in close connection with other people…. But how much worry and how much pain you must often and dearly pay for it….” he wrote to Clara shortly before her death.¹⁵
3. Brahms’ Handling of Biblical Texts
The significance which the Bible had for Johannes Brahms as a testimony of Christian faith was colored by a characteristic ambivalence. On the one hand, Brahms — a typical North-German Protestant — repeatedly noted with a certain pride that he read daily in his Bible.¹⁶ On the other hand, he did not identify with the texts in a “believing” sense. They awoke images in him, they gave him suggestions, or offered keywords that he could expect to be meaningful to his Protestant audiences. He used such texts as lyrics for his compositions, but he did not intend his music to help proclaim them, as J. S. Bach had. A famous example is Brahms’ view of an apocalyptic passage from 1.Cor. 15:51–2, “We shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable.”¹⁷
Brahms did not intend to proclaim the resurrection of the dead at this point. His biographer Max Kalbeck reports that Brahms emphasized
that he did not believe in the immortality of the soul — neither in 1897, the year of his death, nor in 1868, when he wrote the Requiem. The quote from 1.Cor. made an impression on him purely as a symbol that could be used musically.¹⁸
And this “musically useful” symbol was apparently the trombone and the upward movement it initiates from E flat major to G major, as a symbol of resurrection.
Thus, Brahms used Biblical passages primarily for his musical intentions, not for their own sake. The most famous example of his heterogeneous treatment of Bible texts is ironically also the least known one: his Song of Triumph, a magnificently radiant work from 1871 for eight-part choir and large orchestra. Brahms set music to passages from the Book of Revelation, chapter 19:
Hallelujah! Salvation and praise, honor and power be to God, our Lord! For almighty God has taken the kingdom.
A king of kings, and a lord of lords.
Hallelujah! Amen!
What Brahms had in mind here had nothing whatsoever to do with the apocalyptic moment of the Last Judgment as prophesized by John the Divine. Rather, Brahms was celebrating the German victory over France in 1870, plus the imperial coronation of Kaiser Wilhelm I in January 1871 in Versailles. The “king of kings and lord of lords” is none other than Kaiser Wilhelm, and he has “taken the kingdom.” To him Brahms dedicated this work “reverently.” Like many of his contemporaries, Brahms had apparently been seized by the mighty wave of patriotism, and overdid the religious text by utilizing a Biblical text for patriotic purposes.
To make sure that this text was not exclusively interpreted in religious terms, Brahms introduced in the very first bars and then throughout the first movement the introductory four notes of the German national anthem (with the same music as the British “God save our gracious King”): “Hail to you in the victor’s wreath!” Such nationalistic abuse of a Biblical text is certainly one of the reasons why the Song of Triumph is almost never performed today, at least in Germany — Germany’s recent history does not allow such unfettered nationalism.
Brahms used Biblical texts because they were familiar to him as a North German Protestant. They corresponded in their language and images to his own frame of mind, or stimulated certain musical patterns. They did not stimulate him to preach or proclaim the Biblical message. There is an almost inverted text-to-music relationship in Brahms’ work: whereas Schütz and Bach used their music to interpret and spread the message, Brahms found in Biblical texts primarily an impetus for certain musical ideas. For Schütz and Bach, the music served the text; for Brahms, the text served the music.¹⁹
Thus, for Brahms, Biblical texts had basically the same level of significance as did the poems by Goethe, Schiller, or Hölderlin. When asked about his choice of lyrics for his Song of Destiny, Brahms confessed that the “words” did not matter that much to him.²⁰ However, Brahms did not choose his lyrics arbitrarily or superficially. On the contrary, “he is extremely picky in the choice of his material.”²¹ Precisely because he chose texts in accordance with his own inner disposition, they reflected his personality. Thus, Brahms’ texts reveal more about him than the texts which Schütz and Bach chose tell us about them. In the Biblical texts of Brahms’ choral works and songs, we do not actually meet the Bible, but Johannes Brahms! Here the romantic subjectivity of the 19th century becomes obvious.
4. Works that deal explicitly with death
In three works, Brahms dealt explicitly with the topic of “death.” They are: the motet Why is light given to those in misery? (Op 74.1, 1877), A German Requiem (op. 45, 1868), and the Four Serious Songs (op. 121, 1896). All of them are exclusively compositions for Biblical texts.
4.1 Why is Light Given to Those in Misery?
The introductory text of this motet is from Job 3:20–22, followed by texts from Lamentations and the Epistle of James, and ending with a chorale by Martin Luther. Brahms called this motet a “small reflection of the great Why.” In fact, the question “Why?” is the actual subject of this motet. It starts with “Why” and repeats it again and again. But what follows the Why is by no means always the same. Characteristically, this Why is not asked about why God allows death, suffering, and pain — the classical problem of theodicy which comes up in the Bible only too often: “What is this that God has done to us?” (Gen. 42:28); “Why go I mourning?” (Ps. 43:2); “Why hast thou forsaken me?” (Ps. 22:1); “For what vanity hast thou created all the souls of men?” (Ps. 89:47). Brahms’ Why is not about death and suffering, but about life itself: “Why is life given to the bitter in soul….?” Brahms himself felt “very useless in the world” — not least because of his multiple failures with regard to a permanent full-time position.²²
His choice of text confirms what I stated above: It was not death that troubled Brahms, but life — of course, not life in its beauty, of which Brahms stated in his choral work Nänie (op. 82, text by F. Schiller): “Even the beautiful must die,” but its injuries, its disappointments, its losses — all that makes life “tedious” and leads to “sad hearts.” For him, life robs one more than death! If that is life, why live it in the first place? That is the content of this “great Why.” I recall Brahms’ reaction to the birth of the child of Joseph Joachim, “The best you cannot wish him anymore — not to have been born at all.”
The musical structure of the motet is polyphonic-contrapuntal — a style which reminds one of J. S. Bach, but which Brahms’ contemporaries considered antiquated. Chromatic, tormenting tone-shifts underline the agony of the “sad hearts.” Equally Bach-like is the conclusion of the motet with a Lutheran chorale. It emphasizes that death is actually a welcome answer to the question “Why?”
With peace and joy I leave this world (…)
Death has become my sleep.
Incidentally, Bach could also call death “the brother of sleep,” such as in the final chorale of his cantata Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen (“I would gladly bear the cross,” BWV 56).²³ However, this image is ambivalent: For J.S. Bach, death meant sleep because Christ would wake him up again, so he no longer needed to fear death. For Brahms, on the other hand, “sleep” meant that he would finally find rest, and the agonizing “Why” would also come to rest. That is why he no longer needed to fear death. As I said: Brahms did not believe in a resurrection from death, nor did he believe in the immortality of the soul. “The only true immortality is in the children,” he once said in a letter. That is a surprising declaration for a man who did not have children of his own — unless we infer from it that Brahms regarded his works — i.e., that which he had “begotten” — as his “children.” And indeed, they made him immortal!
Brahms had Bach in mind when he wrote his “Why?” motet. In bar 36 he made it unmistakably clear. Over the words “who long for death” he changed the original tone sequence in the soprano to B-A-C-H (“H” is B-natural in the German scale). By the way, this motet has generally been considered to be the “most important composition in this genre since Bach.”²⁴
4.2 A German Requiem
The German Requiem is Brahms’ greatest and grandest choral work. What does it tell us about Brahms’ relationship with death? First of all, his Requiem differs from the many traditional settings of the classical Roman Catholic requiem mass, which take the Latin text of the canonical liturgy and set it to music. Secondly, not only did Brahms write his German Requiem in German, he chose his own texts from the Lutheran Bible. The difference in message is significant. The traditional Latin requiem focuses on the deceased, the intercession for them, the terror of the last judgment, and, finally, salvation from eternal abandonment through the Lamb of God. Brahms‘ Requiem, on the other hand, focuses on the bereaved — those who stay behind and have to live with the loss. For them, and to offer them comfort,²⁵ he wrote his Requiem. After finishing the first version he claimed, “I have finished my funeral music as a beatitude of the bereaved,”²⁶ a “consolation for those who mourn.”²⁷ His biographer Max Kalbeck called it a “Song of Solace.”²⁸ The deceased do not need intercession and comfort. They “rest from their labors” and are therefore “blessed” (last movement).
Brahms’ selection of texts for his Requiem says much about his relationship to death. The death to be afraid of, the death one must deal with, is not one’s own death, but the death of those whom one loses, for after such a death, such a bereavement, one must continue to live. That is also the background of Brahms’ unusual opinion: life robs you more than (your own) death does.
Brahms opened the Requiem with a “beatitude of the mourners” — “Blessed are they that mourn….” He ended his work with the same music, albeit with a different text. That tells us something about how he understood the new text (from Revelation 14:13): “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth (…) they rest from their labors, and (…) their works follow after them.”
Brahms repeated the section “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth” several times. This is where his interest lay. By underlaying this text with the same music as the text from the beginning (“Blessed are they that mourn”), he did not simply complete the circle of his Requiem formally. He established a relationship, a resemblance between those who are comforted as mourners and those who die in the Lord. “Blessed” are both groups, and the music underlines this both times with a comforting, almost cheerful F major harmony. We listeners might primarily hear “mourn” and “die,” but Brahms set the accent on “blessed.” “Blessed” means close to God. Brahms might not have believed in a bodily resurrection, but his music “knows” a being-near-God: God is with the mourners (first movement) and the dead are with God (last movement). That is the theological frame of his German Requiem.
The center of the whole work — an extended choral fugue in the third movement — confirms this: “The righteous souls are in the hand of God.”²⁹ This phrase does not come from any canonical Biblical book, but from an apocryphal one: the Wisdom of Salomon (3:1), from around the first century BC. This writing is strongly Hellenistic. The notion that souls are eternal, are always “in the hand of God” is alien to the Judaism of the Old Testament and the Christianity of the New Testament — or, at any rate, was never explicitly expressed that way. Instead, both (or at least, pre-exile Judaism) expected a total death, followed by a new creation.
For Brahms, however, this Hellenistic idea corresponded exactly to his own feelings, for this was his personal hope after death: to be in God’s hand and to suffer no more. For him, this statement was the answer to the psalmist’s question, “Now, Lord, O, what do I wait for? My hope is in Thee” (Ps. 39:7). What comes next is the core of Brahms’ hope: “The righteous souls are in the hand of God, nor pain, nor grief shall nigh them come.”
Musically, this phrase is underscored by a seemingly endless organ-point (drone in the bass), above which the choir intones a fugue in the manner of Bach. This organ-point is one of the longest in classical music history: 35 bars of the tone D in the orchestral bass, symbolizing eternity. In this whole passage, the bass note does not change at all, as the music returns home to its origin; life has found its unchanging base, has come to rest.
This, then, was Brahms’ hope — rest and tranquility in God’s hand after all the discontinuity and restlessness of earthly life. Thus, the next movement sings about the “lovely dwellings” God has in store: “How lovely is Thy dwelling place” (Ps. 84:2). This was Brahms’ eschatological (endtime) vision: a home, a permanent dwelling place with God. It is a central piece within the personal creed of a man who felt homelesss for most of his time on earth.
Brahms thus had an idea of salvation, but he did not need Christ for it. This is particularly evident in the Requiem, where Brahms deliberately left out all references to Christ. Karl Reinthaler, the conductor of the premiere performance of the Requiem in the Bremen Cathedral in 1868, pointed out to Brahms that that was a problem: “the Christian consciousness [i.e. of the audience] will miss the decisive element: the redemptive death of our Lord.” He suggested attaching a corresponding passage to the phrase “Death, O where is thy sting?” in the sixth movement.
Brahms declined. Without further explanation, he conceded that he had deliberately (“with all knowledge and will”) omitted all christological references. The consequence was, incidentally, that in the premiere and also in later performances, a movement from Handel’s Messiah was inserted in the middle of the work: “I know that my redeemer liveth.” It was necessary in order to legitimize a performance in a church instead of a concert hall. Brahms, apparently, had no objections — perhaps because of his high regard for Handel.³⁰
With this attitude, Brahms was a typical representative of 19th century liberal Protestant culture. For him, death was an existential, not a religious, dilemma, in contrast to Bach. That is why in his Requiem no Christ appears, no lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world — Brahms does not need them for his idea of salvation. Instead, he quotes the Psalms: “Lord, make me to know the measure of my days on earth, to consider my frailty that I must perish.” (39:5)
In view of death, Brahms faced the Creator, not the Judge from whose judgment a vicarious death must save him. This becomes clear in his treatment of the doxology, of the great song of praise in the sixth movement. Here the choir sings, “Worthy art Thou to be praised, Lord of honor and might, for thou hast earth and heaven created, and for Thy good pleasure all things have their being, and were created.” Clearly, God the Creator is being addressed. The final chorus of Handel’s Messiah uses similar words, but refers to the Lamb that is worthy to be praised: “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, and hath redeemed us to God by His blood, to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.” Both lyrics come from the Book of Revelation (5:12 vs. 4:11), but with a totally different accent. Brahms knew Handel’s Messiah well, and he knew what it meant when he diverted the christological praise of the lamb to the praise of the creator. He did it deliberately.
4.3 Four Serious Songs (op. 121) and Nänie (op. 82)
What we discovered in the Requiem is confirmed by Brahms’ text selection in his last major vocal composition, the Four Serious Songs of 1896. His view of death was marked by the skepticism of Old Testament wisdom literature. This is where his spiritual home was. Consequently, it is hardly surprising that at the end of his own life, he chose lyrics from Ecclesiastes and from (the apocryphal) Jesus Sirach for three of these songs. However, his text selection for the last song is surprising — it is the praise of love from 1. Corinthians 13: “So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (13:13).
In the lyrics of the first three songs, we find Brahms’ characteristic ambivalence when dealing with death. For example, in the third song we find, “O death, how bitter you are…” but also “O death, how comforting you are….” It reminds one of his motet “Why.” In the light of Brahms’ own experience — that life robs one more than death does — it is death that is ultimately the lesser evil of the two.
Thus, we find in the second song: “Then I praised the dead, who had already died, more than the living” — and he praised even more the one who was not yet born, because he would not live to see all the evil under the sun.³¹
The death that leaves one in mourning is the “bitter death.” This is the death that Brahms feared and that he had to live through with his close friends Robert and Clara Schumann and his own mother. At the same time, this experience of loss convinced him that death cannot extinguish the love that existed between people; he continued to love Robert and Clara and his mother after their death. Brahms did indeed experience a love that was stronger than death.³²
Thus, in view of Brahms’ biography, it is no surprise that in the last of his Serious Songs, he professed love as the everlasting power.
In his composition of Friedrich Schiller’s poem Nänie (op. 82), Brahms even changed the sequence of the lyrics in order to make this point that love is stronger than death. Schiller concluded his poem “Even the beautiful must perish” with the words “For the ignoble goes down to Orcus in silence.” Brahms did not agree with this silence. Thus, he let the choir repeat the line preceding Schiller’s last line, which says, “A lament on the lips of the beloved one is glorious.” Not silence is the last word, but this lament as an expression of love which transcends death. The way Brahms treated this phrase musically shows that he was quite aware that he was standing on eschatological ground. One feels reminded of the end of the Song of Destiny, where the music returns wordlessly to heaven — and takes the audience along. Brahms: “I just say something the poet does not say.”
5. Conclusion
A few weeks before his death, Brahms told a friend — knowing for some time that his liver cancer had reached the terminal stage — “I will soon make a long, long journey of which you will hear.”³³ We did hear of it, and we know from his music that he started this journey long before his death.
The organ chorale O Welt, ich muss dich lassen (“O World, I have to leave you”) is the very last work from his pen. He presented it, together with ten other chorale preludes for organ, to Clara Schumann’s daughter as a “true sacrifice for her beloved mother,”³⁴ who had died in May 1896, roughly a year before Brahms himself.
This hymn does not represent, as one critic assumed, primarily the “lament over our transience,” which as a “leitmotif pervades Brahms’ life and work.”³⁵ Rather, Brahms’ composition was stimulated by the image presented in the last two lines, that body and life are placed in God’s gracious hand, just as the central statement in the Requiem claims, “The righteous souls are in the hand of God.” He affirmed here for himself what he wrote in the Requiem: this was his belief.³⁶
Oh world, I have to leave you,
Continue on my pathway
To the eternal fatherland.
I willingly give my spirit
And lay my life and body
In God’s all-gracious hand.
English translation from the original German: Elizabeth van Gelder Deutsch
¹ See F. Grasberger, Johannes Brahms: Variationen um sein Wesen, Vienna 1952, p. 102: With Brahms one finds “a preoccupation with the problem of death, reaching into the most hidden depths of his creative existence.” Translations from the original German into English that are not sourced are by the author.
² Hans Mayer, “Ein Denkmal für Johannes Brahms,” in H. Mayer, Ein Denkmal für Johannes Brahms, 1983, p. 71.
³ 1877, quoted by H. Mayer, loc. cit., p. 69.
⁴ Ecclesiastes 4:2 (RSV).
⁵ Quoted in Siegfried Kross, “Brahms und Schumann” in Brahms-Studien, vol. 4, Hamburg 1981, p. 40.
⁶ See Siegfried Bauer, Johannes Brahms, p. 42.
⁷ Max Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, vol. II, pp. 1 and 43 . Kalbeck refers to Brahms’ song “To my homeland” (Heimat) op. 64, 1.
⁸ Quoted in H. A. Neunzig, Brahms, p. 110.
⁹ ibid., p. 59.
¹⁰ ibid., p. 48.
¹¹ Quoted in Neunzig, loc. cit., p. 110.
¹² Translation from lyricstranslate.com, Engl. translation of J. W. v. Goethe, “Harzreise im Winter,” translator unnamed
¹³ Here I differ from S. Kross, Brahms und Schumann, p. 37.
¹⁴ Quoted by: F. Grasberger, Johannes Brahms: Variationen um sein Wesen, p. 275.
¹⁵ Letter of January 26, 1896: cf. Litzmann, vol II, p. 612.
¹⁶ Brahms in a letter to Rudolf von der Leyen: “People don’t know that we North-Germans demand the Bible every day and do not let a day pass without it. In my study, I can find my Bible in the dark”. Quoted in Robert Henried, Brahms und das Christentum, p. 21.
¹⁷ 1. Cor 15:51–2. (RSV), used in the 6th movement of his German Requiem. The Lutheran translation that Brahms used mentions a “trombone” instead of a “trumpet,” so Brahms used trombones for the musical representation of this passage.
¹⁸ M. Kalbeck, vol. II, p. 238, footnote.
¹⁹ F. Grasberger speaks correctly of a “primacy of the musical over the lyrical,” loc. cit., p. 59.
²⁰ Cf. Kalbeck, Brahms, vol. II, p. 366.
²¹ Neunzig, loc. cit. p. 110.
²² Cf. Grasberger, loc. cit., p. 261.
²³ Cf. the final chorale in Bach’s cantata Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (BWV 106): “With peace and joy I leave this world,” with the line “Death has become my sleep.”
²⁴ I. Fellinger, “Brahms’ Bedeutung in heutiger Zeit,” in: Brahms-Studien VI, Hamburg 1985, p. 27.
²⁵ “I want to comfort you as one is comforted by his mother.”
²⁶ Quoted in Klaus Blum, Hundert Jahre Ein Deutsches Requiem von Johannes Brahms, Tutzing 1971, p.
²⁷ ibid. p. 131.
²⁸ M. Kalbeck, loc. cit., vol II, p. 248.
²⁹ M.Kalbeck (II, p. 245) calls this phrase — somewhat misleadingly — “the foundation of Brahms’ ethics.” What he means is the foundation of Brahms’ eschatology. “Ethics” deals with human behavior, whereas “eschatology” deals with the final destiny of mankind and/or the soul.
³⁰ For this whole matter, see K. Blum, Hundert Jahre Deutsches Requiem, pp. 34f.
³¹ Brahms refused to ever attend a public performance of his Four Serious Songs. They came too close to his core.
³² Max Kalbeck discovers in the piano accompaniment of the Funeral Song op. 13 traces of a “love that overcomes death” (I, p. 383).
³³ Quoted in J. Grasberger, loc. cit., p. 340.
³⁴ Quoted in Joachim-Ernst Berendt, Hinübergehen: Das Wunder des Spätwerks, p. 57.
³⁵ R. Gerber, loc. cit., p. 239
³⁶ Antonin Dvorak did not really know Brahms well when he concluded after meeting Brahms in 1896: “He doesn’t believe in anything!” (quoted in: R. Gerber, loc.cit. p. 239).
