|
These pages contain program notes written for Redwood
Symphony. You are free to use the information in your own program
notes. If you quote me directly, please attribute it. Thanks!
These notes were edited, amended, and otherwise
improved by Eric Kujawsky, Peter Stahl, and Doug Wyatt.
Barbara Heninger
|
Johannes Brahms
Begräbnisgesang
Johannes Brahms was an accomplished and prolific composer for voice, his
vocal works including lieder, folk songs, secular and religious choral settings,
and perhaps his most famous choral work, the great German Requiem of 1857-68.
His choral pieces exemplify his considerable skills in both embracing and
expanding upon classical structures and forms, including a masterful technique
in canon and fugue, and his ability, as critic Philip Radcliffe writes, "to
continue and sustain a long melodic line."
Brahms wrote the Begräbnisgesang, or Burial Song, in the autumn of
1858, when he was working as a choral director in Detmold. It was first
performed under the composer's direction in December of 1859 in Hamburg, and was
his first published work to combine vocal and orchestral forces. He had also
recently begun work on the German Requiem (which would take him 11 years to
complete), and perhaps the shorter piece was a way to "warm up" to
some of the themes of the Requiem. Certainly the text, a setting of funeral
verses by the sixteenth-century writer Michael Weisse, treats the same themes of
death and resurrection. Unlike the Requiem, however, this work is scored only
lightly, for a handful of woodwinds, brass, and timpani, whose timbres seem
chosen to echo that of the voices. Indeed, the piece opens with bassoons and
choral basses in somber unison. The emphasis on winds also reflects the work's
Renaissance poetic source, and Brahms's growing interest in both Renaissance and
Baroque choral music as he worked more closely with choral ensembles.
The piece opens with a C-minor melody, contrasted with a single-note motif
for the second verse that is eminently funereal in its insistent, marching
beat--and whose ominous timpani ostinato anticipates a similar gesture in the
later Requiem. Brahms is quite literal in his setting of the Biblical "last
trump" or Posaune (trombone) in German: the voices rise to an impassioned
crescendo and, yes, trombones sound! The mood and mode shift to C major with the
beginning of the fourth verse, as the lyrics describe the end of toil and the
soul's joyful transfiguration. The final verse returns to the opening minor
melody as the mourners leave the graveside, but Brahms ends the piece on a quiet
C-major chord, in a lovely musical gesture of hope.
June, 2005
|