By Rena Roussin, Musicologist-in-Residence
Usually, when I get to write to you, it’s in my capacity as the Choir’s musicologist-in-residence. However, I’m choosing to largely take off my musicologist hat, and not draw as explicitly on my academic background and expertise as a music historian. Instead, my goal is simply to reflect on Brahms’ Ein deutsche Requiem (German Requiem) on a purely human level, and to consider the numerous life lessons and wisdom this piece conveys.
In spite of my sixteen years of training in Classical music and musicology, there are remarkably few contexts in which I have absolutely fixed, decided, largely unalterable opinions about musical performance. One of those fixed opinions, however—or, perhaps, if you will, one of my personal areas of musical snobbery—is that there is ultimately only one appropriate dynamic at which to perform the tutti, forte/fortissimo return of the opening lines of Ein deutsche Requiem’s second movement, “Den alles Fleisch ist wie Gras” (For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass).
What dynamic might I consider it essential to perform at, you may wonder?
Loud enough to wake the dead.
Or, more aptly, loud enough to awaken those of us who have deadened ourselves to the reality that life goes by in an instant.
Requiem Masses are historically based in the Christian concept of an afterlife, and musically depict prayers that departed loved ones will rest peacefully until a Day of Judgment, after which they will hopefully be rewarded with eternal life in the Kingdom of Heaven. Brahms does not entirely move away from this model; his setting of the Requiem does rest in the hope of eternal life. But in a genre that tends to focus on the dead, Brahms writes for the living. He focuses his Requiem on the despair of loss, the hope of comfort and consolation, and the reality that everything and everyone will one day perish, and that these moments of separation will hold agony. At the same time, Brahms uses this knowledge of death to ask us to look squarely and firmly at the life we are living, all but grabbing us by the shoulders and shouting (in B-flat minor) to remind us that we, too, are mortal. That nothing on earth is permanent. And so, how do we live, how do we go on, how do we love, holding that knowledge?
In the early days of the pandemic lockdown, the Requiem was a piece I turned to frequently, trying to make sense of both my grief in seeing so much pain and death, and separation from loved ones impacting so many people worldwide. At the same time, I was turning to the Requiem to try to process some of my personal grief and fears about my own mortality and that of my loved ones. I was not alone in turning to Brahms. In April 2020, music critic Alex Ross shared his experience of drawing on the composer’s music as a companion to his grief as his mother was dying. Ross writes that in Brahms, he found “the most companionable, the most sympathetic of composers. There is enormous sadness in his work, and yet it is a sadness that glows with understanding, that eases gloom by sharing its own. The music seems in a strange way to be listening to you, even as you listen to it. At a time when an uncommonly large number of people are experiencing grief, I recommend Brahms as a counsellor and confidant.”
Arguably, one of the things that lends the Requiem its power is its ability, through music, to depict and acknowledge truths about grief. Like grief itself, Brahms’ music runs the emotional gamut of despair, rage, bargaining, sudden memory and musical recalls, and ultimately, acceptance. The gift of Brahms’ ability to depict these feelings is that in doing so, he allows us as listeners to share that sense of grief, and therefore to feel less alone with it.
But I also hear another side to what Brahms’ Requiem has to teach us. The piece far more readily foregrounds questions and moments of ambiguity: generally speaking, it invites us to listen and contemplate. Only rarely does Brahms’ choice of text and musical interpretation of it directly impose answers.
Yet there is one definitive theme I feel Brahms endeavors to answer definitively—the question I ask above, which rests at the heart of any Requiem intended to console the living rather than speak of the dead: How do we live, and how do we love, in the knowledge of such loss?
Boldly. Fully. Urgently. With our entire souls.
Because whether or not we individually believe in eternal life—and there is no certainty that Brahms himself did—there seems to be an act of consolation and of purpose in the act of recalling our own mortality, of drawing on it as a compass to consider what it will mean for us, individually, to have lived and loved well. In knowing, when faced with death, that in the work of living, we did our best. And that when we are faced with the death of those we love, there is comfort in their memories that continue to connect us to them, even after their physical form is gone.
Ultimately, Brahms’ Requiem gives us a chance to sit with these questions, which so often get lost in our busy lives. I hope you’ll take a chance to ponder them in a musical space that concurrently contains so much beauty and consolation. And, of course, to echo Alex Ross, in listening to the TMChoir’s performance of Brahms, I hope you equally hear Brahms listening to you.
Experience Brahms’ A German Requiem with the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir on November 5 at George Weston Recital Hall or November 7 at Koerner Hall.
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Rena Roussin is a doctoral candidate in musicology at the University of Toronto and an incoming (2025-2027) Postdoctoral Associate at Western University. Her research focuses on Western classical music’s historic and current relationships to issues of social justice and activism. She is currently working on a book manuscript on contemporary opera in Canada. As a reconnecting Indigenous person of Haida, Métis, and European settler heritage, Rena is also interested in what roles music might play in working towards reparation and equity with Indigenous artists, communities, and peoples in Canada.
