How Brahms’s ‘A German Requiem’ Became an Anthem for Our Time

The New York concert season now drawing to a close was more or less bookended by performances of Brahms’s “A German Requiem,” intended to set the work in broader contexts. In October, Lincoln Center presented “human requiem,” featuring Simon Halsey and the Berlin Radio Choir in an immersive staging, with two pianists replacing Brahms’s orchestra, and choristers in street clothes wandering among the audience members.

Skip forward to last Saturday, when Mark Shapiro conducted the Cecilia Chorus of New York in Brahms’s requiem at Carnegie Hall, setting it alongside “A Garden Among the Flames,” a new work by the Syrian-born composer Zaid Jabri, based on a Sufi text by the 13th-century poet Ibn Arabi. And on Sunday, Alejandro Hernandez-Valdez led Musica Viva NY in “An Elegy for all Humanity,” at All Souls Church on the Upper East Side, pairing the requiem with Seymour Bernstein’s “Song of Nature,” based on an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“A German Requiem,” it appears, has become something of an anthem for our time, with grand social and political reverberations. Yet, for its composer, the work arose from deeply personal motives. The idea of a requiem seems to have occurred to the young artist in 1854, after a suicide attempt by his newfound compositional father figure, Robert Schumann, who died in 1856. According to an early biographer, Max Kalbeck, Brahms discovered the title “Ein Deutsches Requiem” among manuscripts left by Schumann.

A false start on this work resulted instead in Brahms’s First Piano Concerto, of 1857-58, and the requiem idea came to fruition only after the death of his mother in 1865. “A German Requiem,” in six movements for baritone soloist, chorus and orchestra, had its premiere in 1868, but even then, Brahms returned to the work, adding a seventh movement, for soprano, with the words “I will comfort you as one whom his own mother comforteth.”

Brahms assembled the texts himself from Luther’s German translation of the Bible, bypassing the standard liturgical requiem text, with its fearsome Dies Irae, so vividly set by other composers. Rather than dwelling on the judgment of the deceased, he seemed intent on consoling those left behind. It was Brahms who originated the term “human requiem,” in a letter to Clara Schumann, Robert’s widow and, by then, Brahms’s intimate. This human focus, as well as the work’s freedom from angry religious judgment, makes it easy to seize on in our more vaguely spiritual time.

For its performance on Saturday, the Cecilia Chorus commissioned a new piece that — as Mr. Shapiro, Cecilia’s music director, wrote in a program note — “might be thought of as beginning, spiritually and philosophically, where Brahms left off.” Mr. Jabri — like Brahms, using soprano and baritone soloists — sets a libretto by the South African-born poet Yvette Christiansë, based on the ancient Arabi text, ending “I profess the religion of Love;/Wherever its caravan turns along the way,/That is my belief,/My faith.”

Ms. Christiansë adds text of her own, reflecting on the current Syrian refugee crisis: “We left our gardens,/even the worms./We turned our faces to the road,/ and the road snarled.”

On the chorus’s website, Chelsea Shephard, the soprano soloist, described the intended effect: “After hearing ‘A Garden Among the Flames,’ who can listen to the Brahms Requiem without hearing it as a requiem for Syria?” With a full intermission following the Jabri work, it was easy enough to lose the connection.

Mr. Jabri’s music was striking, but the work lost much of its effect, with the English text largely garbled in the hubbub of a chorus of 178, abetted by a children’s chorus of 28, the Every Voice Concert Choir.

Musica Viva was even more ambitious in scope with its “Elegy” on Sunday. In a program note, Mr. Hernandez-Valdez, the group’s artistic director, called it “a concert designed to make a difference in today’s conflicted world,” reflecting on “our mortality and our planet.” As a companion to the requiem, it presented “Song of Nature,” a 1996 work by Mr. Bernstein, who was the subject of Ethan Hawke’s 2014 documentary film, “Seymour: An Introduction.”

“Song of Nature” takes its text from Emerson’s essay “Nature”: “The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship. As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God.”

In Mr. Hernandez-Valdez’s arrangement, “Song of Nature” runs a crowded 10 minutes or so. The music traverses the dynamic gamut, soft to loud, several times, but the message, generalized as it was, was effectively conveyed by the excellent chorus of 35 and the narrator, David Rockefeller Jr.

For the requiem, Musica Viva deployed 11 players in Joachim Linckelmann’s arrangement for chamber ensemble to good effect, and again, the chorus came through loud and clear. With Devony Smith and Joseph Beutel as fine vocal soloists in the Brahms, and Shabnam Abedi in the Bernstein, this was indeed a stirring concert, though what difference it might make in the larger world was far from apparent.

Surely the impulse to mine a masterwork for all its meanings is praiseworthy, and the sudden vogue for “A German Requiem” is welcome, whatever it may say about our time. And the Cecilia Chorus’s commissioning of a new work for the occasion is altogether admirable, however much you might have wished for a stronger performance.

But all of this added significance is a heavy burden for Brahms’s exquisite farewell to his mentor and his mother. Perhaps the contexts need more detailed discussion and development to carry such presentations beyond the realms of novelty and good intentions.