Brahms Ein deutsches Requiem with Barts Choir

Barts Choir performs Brahms’ choral masterpiece, his sublime Ein deutsches Requiem (German Requiem).

Though a response to grief and loss in his own life, Brahms chose to set not the traditional Latin Requiem Mass, with its visions of death and judgement, but texts from the Lutheran Bible offering peace, hope and consolation.

German not in a nationalistic way, but in its musical as well as textual language, the work draws on the choral tradition of Bach and Handel, blending this with Brahms’ own romantic style and his evolving mastery of large-scale musical form. The result is some of his finest music: dramatic, passionate, but also lyrical – most famously the exquisite psalm setting, ‘How lovely are thy dwellings, O Lord of hosts’.

Richard Crashaw’s translations of two hymns of St Thomas Aquinas, meditating on the sacrifice of Christ and the eucharist, drew an equally deeply-felt response from Gerald Finzi in his large-scale anthem. Commissioned by the great patron of 20th-century sacred music, the Rev Walter Hussey, for St Matthew Northampton, it was first heard in 1946, then orchestrated for performance at the 1947 Three Choirs festival in Gloucester.