On Tuesday, May 30, 2017 at 2:54:34 PM UTC-10, Frank Forman wrote:

How Brahms's 'A German Requiem' Became an Anthem for Our Time https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/arts/music/how-brahmss-a-german-requiem-became-an-anthem-for-our-time.html?

By JAMES R. OESTREICH

The New York concert season now drawing to a close was more or less bookended by performances of Brahms's "A German Requiem," intended
to set the work in broader contexts. In October, Lincoln Center
presented "human requiem," featuring Simon Halsey and the Berlin
Radio Choir in an immersive staging, with two pianists replacing
Brahms's orchestra, and choristers in street clothes wandering among
the audience members.

Skip forward to last Saturday, when Mark Shapiro conducted the
Cecilia Chorus of New York in Brahms's requiem at Carnegie Hall,
setting it alongside "A Garden Among the Flames," a new work by the Syrian-born composer Zaid Jabri, based on a Sufi text by the
13th-century poet Ibn Arabi. And on Sunday, Alejandro
Hernandez-Valdez led Musica Viva NY in "An Elegy for all Humanity,"
at All Souls Church on the Upper East Side, pairing the requiem with
Seymour Bernstein's "Song of Nature," based on an essay by Ralph
Waldo Emerson.

"A German Requiem," it appears, has become something of an anthem
for our time, with grand social and political reverberations. Yet,
for its composer, the work arose from deeply personal motives. The
idea of a requiem seems to have occurred to the young artist in
1854, after a suicide attempt by his newfound compositional father
figure, Robert Schumann, who died in 1856. According to an early
biographer, Max Kalbeck, Brahms discovered the title "Ein Deutsches
Requiem" among manuscripts left by Schumann.

A false start on this work resulted instead in Brahms's First Piano Concerto, of 1857-58, and the requiem idea came to fruition only
after the death of his mother in 1865. "A German Requiem," in six
movements for baritone soloist, chorus and orchestra, had its
premiere in 1868, but even then, Brahms returned to the work, adding
a seventh movement, for soprano, with the words "I will comfort you
as one whom his own mother comforteth."

Brahms assembled the texts himself from Luther's German translation
of the Bible, bypassing the standard liturgical requiem text, with
its fearsome Dies Irae, so vividly set by other composers. Rather
than dwelling on the judgment of the deceased, he seemed intent on
consoling those left behind. It was Brahms who originated the term
"human requiem," in a letter to Clara Schumann, Robert's widow and,
by then, Brahms's intimate. This human focus, as well as the work's
freedom from angry religious judgment, makes it easy to seize on in
our more vaguely spiritual time.

For its performance on Saturday, the Cecilia Chorus commissioned a
new piece that--as Mr. Shapiro, Cecilia's music director, wrote in
a program note--"might be thought of as beginning, spiritually and philosophically, where Brahms left off." Mr. Jabri--like Brahms,
using soprano and baritone soloists--sets a libretto by the South African-born poet Yvette Christiansë, based on the ancient Arabi
text, ending "I profess the religion of Love;/Wherever its caravan
turns along the way,/That is my belief,/My faith."

Ms. Christiansë adds text of her own, reflecting on the current
Syrian refugee crisis: "We left our gardens,/even the worms./We
turned our faces to the road,/ and the road snarled."

On the chorus's website, Chelsea Shephard, the soprano soloist,
described the intended effect: "After hearing 'A Garden Among the
Flames,' who can listen to the Brahms Requiem without hearing it as
a requiem for Syria?" With a full intermission following the Jabri
work, it was easy enough to lose the connection.

Mr. Jabri's music was striking, but the work lost much of its
effect, with the English text largely garbled in the hubbub of a
chorus of 178, abetted by a children's chorus of 28, the Every Voice
Concert Choir.

Musica Viva was even more ambitious in scope with its "Elegy" on
Sunday. In a program note, Mr. Hernandez-Valdez, the group's
artistic director, called it "a concert designed to make a
difference in today's conflicted world," reflecting on "our
mortality and our planet." As a companion to the requiem, it
presented "Song of Nature," a 1996 work by Mr. Bernstein, who was
the subject of Ethan Hawke's 2014 documentary film, "Seymour: An Introduction."

"Song of Nature" takes its text from Emerson's essay "Nature": "The
happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship. As
a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God."

In Mr. Hernandez-Valdez's arrangement, "Song of Nature" runs a
crowded 10 minutes or so. The music traverses the dynamic gamut,
soft to loud, several times, but the message, generalized as it was,
was effectively conveyed by the excellent chorus of 35 and the
narrator, David Rockefeller Jr.

For the requiem, Musica Viva deployed 11 players in Joachim
Linckelmann's arrangement for chamber ensemble to good effect, and
again, the chorus came through loud and clear. With Devony Smith and
Joseph Beutel as fine vocal soloists in the Brahms, and Shabnam
Abedi in the Bernstein, this was indeed a stirring concert, though
what difference it might make in the larger world was far from
apparent.

Surely the impulse to mine a masterwork for all its meanings is praiseworthy, and the sudden vogue for "A German Requiem" is
welcome, whatever it may say about our time. And the Cecilia
Chorus's commissioning of a new work for the occasion is altogether admirable, however much you might have wished for a stronger
performance.

But all of this added significance is a heavy burden for Brahms's
exquisite farewell to his mentor and his mother. Perhaps the
contexts need more detailed discussion and development to carry such presentations beyond the realms of novelty and good intentions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/arts/music/wozzeck-opera-berg.html

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