Interview: Kent Nagano on recreating the 1868 premiere of Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem
Andrew Farach-Colton
Friday, January 24, 2025
Kent Nagano has recorded Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem as it was presented at the work’s Bremen premiere on Good Friday 1868, without the yet-to-be-composed fifth movement, but with musical interpolations and vast choral forces. Andrew Farach-Colton finds out more
Like so many of Brahms’s significant early works, Ein deutsches Requiem had a long and difficult gestation. Its performance history is also complex – unusually so for a composer who was otherwise so diligent about presenting his work to the public in fully finished form.
The Requiem’s first three movements were presented at a concert in Vienna in December 1867 by the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde under Johann Herbeck. The critic Eduard Hanslick reported that the audience welcomed the first two movements with unanimous applause, but the third was greeted less warmly. Lack of rehearsal was an issue, certainly, as was realisation of the pedal fugue at the conclusion of that section, which – thanks to an over-enthusiastic timpanist – Hanslick said came across like ‘a passenger rattling through a tunnel in an express train’.
‘Even without the missing fifth movement, the Bremen premiere wasn’t quite A German Requiem as we know it’
A few months before that Vienna concert, Brahms had agreed to conduct a complete presentation of the score as it existed at the time – the fifth movement with soprano solo had yet to be composed – on the following Good Friday in Bremen Cathedral. Even without that missing movement, the Bremen premiere wasn’t quite A German Requiem as we know it. Works by Bach, Tartini and Schumann arranged for violin and organ (the violin solos played by Joseph Joachim) were interpolated between the third and fourth movements, and excerpts from Bach’s St Matthew Passion and Handel’s Messiah (in Mozart’s orchestration) were appended at the end. Yet this major event – akin to a festival performance, with an audience in excess of 2000 – was a watershed moment in the composer’s evolving career. In August 2022 Kent Nagano recreated exactly that 1868 premiere in Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie – working closely with musicologist Dr Wolfgang Sandberger, director of the Brahms Institute in nearby Lübeck – and those performances were recorded by BIS.
‘I’d read about this famous Bremen performance in books, but to put it together was really an enormous project,’ the conductor tells me via Zoom from his home in Montreal. ‘First of all, we know from the notes that are left to us that an immense choir was used – hundreds and hundreds of voices. It wasn’t a professional choir but one made up of church and community choirs, so we did the same, gathering nearly 400 voices, and the level of singing was extraordinarily high. The choir tradition is, in my opinion, one of Hamburg’s hidden secrets, and was a wonderful discovery for me.’
Finding the vocal soloists was another challenge. In 1868, at Joseph Joachim’s request, his wife Amalie participated by singing ‘Erbarme dich’ from the St Matthew Passion as well as ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ from Messiah. ‘To find a singer who can manage the high soprano part in the Handel and who can also get down to the lower mezzo or contralto range for the Bach … well, that was quite a journey in itself,’ Nagano admits. In the end, American mezzo Kate Lindsey filled Amalie’s shoes quite nicely.
‘For all of us who participated, this project had a powerful impact on our understanding of what Brahms meant by A German Requiem. Yes, this Bremen premiere was a big event in Brahms’s compositional career. We can read about it and understand theoretically what it was he had in mind, but to actually live through this experience was something remarkable.
‘We need to remember that the composition of the Requiem had not been without its problems. It took Brahms years to write, and it was conceived within the context of what we now regard as the “war of the Romantics”. To give you an example of the polarisation taking place at the time, he began work on it in 1865, the same year Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde was premiered. To contemplate writing this German Requiem right at the time that Wagner was creating history must not have been easy – and then Das Rheingold appeared just a few months after the Bremen Good Friday performance. I think it’s fair to imagine that, given the context, Brahms must have felt a certain amount of pressure.’
Paradoxically, perhaps, one of the aspects of Brahms’s musical personality that Nagano says makes him consider the composer such a pioneer – and one that’s especially notable given the proximity of Wagner’s ‘music of the future’ – is that in determining the way forward Brahms would often look back. ‘Consider his purchase of the complete edition of Johann Sebastian Bach’s works or his studies of Heinrich Schütz’s Ein deutsches Requiem. His intense study of counterpoint, fugue and passacaglia and the way in which he integrated these in finding his own path – I believe you can see all these elements coming into play even in his choice of extracts from the Bible.’
‘When Brahms began work on his German Requiem in 1865, he must have felt a certain amount of pressure’
Kent NaganoNagano suggests that in this particular circumstance it’s not difficult to understand why Brahms assembled his text using ‘indirect’ or ‘poetic’ references to Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection rather than being dogmatic, although this caused its own problems. ‘The powers that be in Bremen were extremely unhappy with the fact that not only were there no references to the crucifixion or resurrection, but that Brahms did not include even a single reference to Jesus Christ. They made their displeasure known while making it clear that their expectations somehow had to be met. The musical interpolations come out of this complex background, for at least in this way the dogma was referenced, even if the music wasn’t Brahms’s own.
‘In order to find a way to integrate this dogma in an aesthetically acceptable way,’ Nagano continues, ‘Brahms called upon his friend Joachim, who was playing in the orchestra. And if you’re going to have Joachim in your ensemble, you should give him something soloistic. That’s why Brahms included the arrangements of Tartini and Bach, and this also allowed the great cathedral’s organ to be featured. And then Joachim asked that his wife be involved. It’s just like today, actually, where so often there are practical elements to think about. So, ultimately, this complicated manner in which Brahms fulfilled his contract to provide something appropriate for the Easter celebration still allowed him to maintain his artistic integrity.’
I wonder whether, besides the obvious lack of the fifth movement, there are any other textual differences between the score as it was presented in Bremen in April 1868 and the version that was ultimately published later that year. ‘According to Dr Sandberger’s research, the answer is no, although in terms of performance practice he was able to determine calculations of the numbers that might have been involved in this performance. The string section was larger than we might normally assume to be the case, and of course the choir was considerably larger, as I’ve mentioned. All this has a tremendous impact on how we experience the Requiem, and particularly within a large performance space like the cathedral in Bremen – and as we performed it in Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, of course.’
Another factor to take into consideration in a discussion of performance practice regarding the Requiem, Nagano argues, is Brahms’s keen interest in the modal polyphony of the Renaissance masters. ‘We can assume that Brahms had a great sensitivity to dissonance and how it was used; how one approaches a resolution in terms of flexibility of tempos, dynamics and agogic stresses. We also know he complained about performances of polyphonic music led by other conductors because he wrote about their overwhelming weightiness, the lack of transparency, the inability to hear the middle voices, and the metronomic inflexibility, as well as dynamics that he said ranged only from mezzo-forte to fortissimo. These issues were critically important to Brahms – and, of course, there are extensive passages of modal polyphony in the Requiem. So while we don’t know exactly how Brahms performed his music, there is sufficient source material to give us an idea of how he might have approached these concerns. In this way, our performances can be more than simply, “Well, I just feel it should go this way”.’
There is one small but significant change Brahms did make many years after the publication of the Requiem, and that was to insist that the publisher remove the printed metronome marks. This makes total sense, Nagano says. ‘So many of the composers I’ve worked with also resist adding metronome marks at all. A marking that might be appropriate for a dry acoustic would be inappropriate for a live acoustic, say, and a smaller performance space may often require a different tempo or tempos to convey the same emotional or psychological feeling as it would in an expansive arena or larger hall. Olivier Messiaen, with whom I worked quite closely, wrote no metronome marks at all; those that exist in his scores were added later by his wife Yvonne Loriod merely to give an idea of what past performances were like. In a way, Messiaen’s tempo markings are much like Brahms’s: “Lively”, “Somewhat lively”, “Slow”, “Extremely slow”. They’re dimensional instructions that can also provide profound emotional or spiritual orientation.’
Given the unusual size of the forces involved in the Elbphilharmonie performances, I wonder if this provided a challenge for the recording’s producers and engineers. ‘Oh, yes. It was a huge challenge technically for the team. There were so many people on the stage, and such a huge chorus that the distance between one choir member on one side and another on the opposite side was unusually large. But we did have advantages as well as challenges.’
One advantage, Nagano says, was the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra – the orchestra of the Hamburg Opera, where he’s served as general music director since 2015. ‘Because we play opera, the orchestra have a musical radar system that results in a certain empathy for voices, even if they are far away. That was extremely helpful. As for the various choirs involved, the vast majority came from the very active church choir scene in Hamburg, as I’ve mentioned, and Hamburg being a Protestant city, the Brahms Requiem is performed quite frequently. That also helped a great deal, as did the fact that being native German speakers, it wasn’t necessary to spend rehearsal time on pronunciation. And, finally, there’s the acoustic of the Elbphilharmonie itself which was helpful because it has so much light and colour to it.’
For Good Friday in 2025, Nagano will be bringing this historic Bremen Cathedral programme to the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, where he’s served as conductor emeritus since stepping down as music director in 2020. ‘Bringing this version of the Requiem as Brahms conducted it on Good Friday 1868 in Bremen to Québec made sense because, like Hamburg, the Québecois also have a great choral tradition. Historically speaking, Québec is a region of North America that never divorced itself entirely from Europe. They’ve never taken an isolationist point of view and still keep those ties very much alive today.’
I remind Nagano that the last time we spoke (back in 2011, when the OSM were preparing to move to their new concert hall), we talked about his predilection for creating fresh perspectives on familiar repertoire. I suggest that this recreation of the Bremen premiere of Brahms’s Requiem is yet another example of this. The conductor pauses briefly before responding. ‘I will quote my profound piano professor who told me this when I was maybe seven or eight years old: “Kent, if audiences don’t come to a performance of our great masterpieces, it’s not Beethoven’s fault and it’s not Brahms’s fault.” The fault, he said, is in how we perform the works, and it’s not just in terms of the quality of the performances but also the context in which they are shared with the public. My teacher’s point was that the status quo – the simple repetition of a model we might feel comfortable with – does a disservice to these masterpieces because that’s generally not how they were performed. More often than not they were performed at exceptional events, events that could have great social meaning. So, today, we need to look beyond routine, to look beyond comfort and – through thoughtful research – try to present these familiar works in a context that offers an opportunity to experience them in a way that reveals the genius that lies behind their composition.’
Kent Nagano’s recording of Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem on BIS is available on February 21 and will be reviewed in the next issue