Brahms: A German Requiem

Summary

Such works as his German Requiem endear themselves to us as being musically great fun; but to take them quite seriously is to make them oppressively dull.

G. B. Shaw: The Music of the Future

Shaw first reported on Brahms's Requiem in an article called ‘Gas and Gaiters’ which appeared in The Star in May 1890. ‘A solid piece of music manufacture … it could only have come from the establishment of a first-class undertaker.’ The tedium of sitting through it had been intolerable, and for years the memory haunted him: ‘There are some sacrifices which should not be demanded twice of any man; and one of them is listening to Brahms's Requiem.’ The experience, he said, ‘is patiently borne only by the corpse’.

This, I had always thought, was Shaw being Shavian. In fact there were plenty who shared his boredom if not his happy way of expressing it. The Musical Times, writing on the first London performance in 1873, detected ‘a feeling of weariness in the audience’, and the Monthly Musical Record, which was of opinion that ‘Herr Brahms is a very unequal composer’, felt that the work would ‘have certainly gained in effect by judicial curtailment’. What has surprised me is to find the sentiment echoed at this very day by friends and colleagues who, as they say, ‘cannot stand it’. The precise grounds for criticism or disaffection have not been made clear but, having listened to the work in nearly thirty recordings, I can certainly see one possible cause.