The Original ‘Performance’ of the Brahms Requiem

by Dr. Mark Sumner, Director of Music

On October 2, 1867, more than a year after having more or less completed the Requiem, Brahms wrote, from Vienna, to Karl Reinthaler, in Bremen. He hoped Reinthaler might be considering a performance of the work at the cathedral there. But the score was not in performable shape at that time and according to Reinthaler’s October 5th replay to Brahms, it did not yet have solo sections. A week later he had a response from Reinthaler in Bremen which included a planned performance there on Good Friday, April 10, of the following year: A week later he wrote back, telling Reinthaler, “I will, for various reasons, perform the first half here (Vienna) (on Dec. 1) and will most likely not have the opportunity to hear it in its entirety.” The Vienna performance was to be conducted by a man who would later become a rival.

This was Johann von Herbeck, a largely self-taught conductor and composer, who was eager to secure for himself, his organization, and Vienna the premier of this new work. This was characteristic of Herbeck, who was always interested in new or little-performed works. He had, for example, been shown the manuscript of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, and succeeded in arranging for its premier just two years earlier. The “various reasons” for performing only the first half, of which Brahms, spoke, probably included negotiations with Herbeck, who was a shrewd fellow, full of ambition and eager to advance. That Brahms said he would “most likely” hear only three movements may indicate that such negotiations were still under way at that very time. It was the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, with which Herbeck had been associated since 1858, that was to give this “partial premier” as a part of a concert dedicated to the memory of Schubert. The entire work was, it seems, to have been available for performance, but Herbeck apparently could afford only the time to do half of it on a program that was mostly to be music of Schubert.

Johann Herbeck was considered to be brilliant but careless. Confirmation of the second point becomes obvious to us when we read that the performance was not sufficiently rehearsed and thus the “partial premier” was only a partial success. The first three movements were performed as planned in a 1:30pm concert on Sunday, Dec. 1, 1867; the first two movements were praised and the audience, for the most part, applauded for a long time at the end of the performance of the three movements. But the third movement was controversial, as it remains to some extent to today. At this performance it was the tympani player who created the controversy. Brahms had written his “eternal D,” as he like to call it, a pedal-point under a double fugue, lasting thirty-six double bars. In the autograph score the tympani is marked fp. It is possible that the tympani part was marked ff instead of fp. Thus the instruction would have been to play “very loudly” not play “loudly for the first beat and then continue softly thereafter.” Adolf Schubring suggests in a review of the Requiem that the part said fp and the tympanist just played forte the whole time, which he calls a “fatal misunderstanding.” It is also possible the tympanist just mis-read the dynamic. Then, too, he was perhaps just under-rehearsed, had not attended a rehearsal at all, or was excessively insensitive. Whatever the cause, the overly energetic tympani sound drowned out the other performers and destroyed the effectiveness of the choral fugue and the orchestral fugue, which could not be heard above his fierce banging. Hanslick said that during this fugue he “experienced the sensations of a passenger rattling through a tunnel in an express train.” This concert showed Brahms the importance of having an organ to sustain this note, which seems to represent the underlying arms of God. He revised this section and used organ to sustain the pedal note along with a ‘soft’ tympani.

A few conservative members of the audience actually hissed and tried to win the day—but the applause overcame their objections. It took Brahms five minutes to make his way to the proper place to receive the recognition accorded him by the audience. According to one source this “partial premier” was also “received with a storm of theological criticism, because the composer had departed from the beaten track and had dared to select his words for himself from the Bible.” It would be a few months before he would truly receive the recognition he deserved—that would have to wait until April in Bremen.

It should be stated, however, that the highly respected music critic, musicologist, and aesthetician Eduard Hanslick gave the work a good review. He spoke of it (in this three movement form, of course) as “one of the finest productions in the realm of sacred music” and acknowledged the influence of Beethoven and Bach that it demonstrated. And Joachim, in a letter to his wife, had this high praise and insightful comment on the early form of the work: “The music is on an equally high plane with the whole idea, with a depth of feeling, and a loftiness and originality of conception which stamps Brahms for me a great man, so that I shall never grumble at the trivial things I do not like in him.”