Yes – I have often been asked – who is my favorite composer – and consistently my answer for many years has been the same – Johannes Brahms – born in 1833 in Hamburg, Germany – died in 1897.

From time to time someone has also asked the logical follow-up question – why. After some reflection I think that I am now finally ready to answer that question.

For me – the music of Brahms represents a superior example of the emotional romantic era music of the 19th century while, at the same time, retaining much of the logical structural integrity and restraint of the great classical era composers of the 18th century.

While I love all of the music that I have ever heard or performed by Brahms – without any doubt two of his works are my most beloved.

First is the Piano Sonata in F Minor, Op. 5 while the other is Ein deutsches Requiem, Op. 45. I will have more to say about each of these monumental works in the coming days.

Robert Shaw wrote the following words about the Requiem in 1997:

“That the world celebrates this year the 100th anniversary of the death of Johannes Brahms with uncountable performances of his German Requiem is testimony not only to the esteem in which his music is held by a large part of the Western World, but also to the very special affection in which his Requiem itself is held.

Though it was his longest work, and acknowledged as very pivotal to his growing renown, he himself was not really satisfied with the title of German Requiem, saying that it referred solely to the language in which it was written. He would now prefer, he said, a ‘human’ Requiem, for he was writing in exploration of a universal human experience.

It should be reported also, that he appeared to find very little comfort in the ritual or dogma of his day. He deliberately abstained from the Latin tradition of centuries in favor of a text which he himself assembled from the Hebraic/Christian Scriptures in Martin Luther’s translation.

Certain things are abundantly clear: first, that he knew these scriptures very well indeed: the text which he gathered to form the seven movements of his Requiem has some sixteen widely separate sources among the thousands of pages of the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha.

In the second place, it is clear that he was more concerned with comforting the hearts of those left to mourn, ratheer than with escorting the departed though the medieval horrors of Wrath and Judgement.

The latter half of the nineteenth century was a period of historical, scientific and intellectual enrichment of the Hebraic/Christian tradition. Though the Latin rites for the dead are deeply embedded in the religious history of Western Civilization, there can be little doubt that Brahms uses his text to welcome the consideration of death as a relevant and illuminating aspect of life itself.” (229-230)*

*The Robert Shaw Reader. Edited by Robert Blocker. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.