In the thirteenth chapter of the biography, “They That Mourn,” Swafford writes about Brahms’ composition of his celebrated choral work Ein deutsches Requiem (“A German Requiem”) and its first performance at Bremen Cathedral on April 10, 1868 (Good Friday). It could be said that it was this work that first gained Brahms an international reputation. The premier was conducted by Karl Reinthaler, Bremen’s music director, with whom Brahms generally had a friendly relationship. However, before the first performance, Reinthaler wrote Brahms a letter in which he pointed out to the composer the odd fact that despite being based on the Christian Bible, the text of the Requiem never mentioned the name of Jesus Christ. He then suggested a way to correct this perceived oversight. However, according to Swafford, Brahms “was not about to put up with that sort of thing. He was a humanist and an agnostic, and his requiem was going to express that, Reinthaler or no…With the title A German Requiem he intended to convey that this is not the liturgical requiem mass in Latin, nor a German translation of it, but a personal testament, a requiem. Brahms avoided dogma in the piece for the same reason. He fashioned an inwardly spiritual work, full of echoes of religious music going back hundreds of years, yet there is no bowing to the altar or smell of incense in it. Even if the words come from the Bible, this was his response to death as a secular, skeptical, modern man” (p. 317).
Eventually, Brahms and Reinthaler worked out a compromise. During the performance of the Requiem, there would also be a performance of “I know that my Redeemer liveth” from Handel’s Messiah to “placate the pious.” However, Brahms refused to amend his own work; consequently, the work “still pointedly made no allusion to the eponymous founder of the Christian religion” (p. 318).
Swafford is the not the first author I have read who has sought explain the absence of any reference to Jesus Christ in the Requiem. I recall reading elsewhere, perhaps in the written notes accompanying a recording of the work, that Brahms deliberately omitted the phrase “Jesus Christ” from his Requiem. However, the reason this author gave was somewhat different from Swafford’s, as I recall. He asserted that Brahms was attempting to make his work appealing to those of varied religious backgrounds. Thus, Brahms tried to make the work “non-sectarian” by avoiding any specific Christian references.
Regardless of whose explanation is correct, I believe Swafford is being rather obtuse in his discussion of this matter. For one thing, not long after asserting that Brahms was a “humanist and an agnostic,” he tells the reader that Brahms kept his religious convictions “close to his chest” (p. 318). If so, how can Swafford be so confident that Brahms was a “humanist and an agnostic”? There seems to be something of a logical problem here. Perhaps there is a way to reconcile these statements, but I think Swafford could have explained it. More significant, however, to me, is the fact that Swafford seems to overlook the fact that while the biblical texts Brahms used for his Requiem do not contain the words “Jesus” or “Jesus Christ,” they still, arguably allude to Him. For example, the opening words of the Requiem are (in English translation): “Blessed, blessed are they that morn, for they shall be comforted.” Where do these words come from? They appear in Matthew 5:4 in the New Testament and are part of the famous passage know as the Beatitudes. And who spoke these works? None other than Jesus Himself! Moreover, the Requiem ends with these words: “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: Yea, said the Spirit, they rest from their labors” (Revelation 14:13—Swafford’s translation). As the verse previous to this one refers to the saints who “remain faithful to Jesus,” it seems reasonable to assume that those who “die in the Lord” are those whose Lord is Jesus. In short, it would seem to be untrue that Brahms’ masterpiece contains no allusions to the “eponymous founder of the Christian religion.”
I also cannot help wondering whether Swafford is, in effect, putting words into Brahms’ mouth in his discussion of Brahms’ response to Reinthaler. He states: “[in Brahms’ letter] to Reinthaler, he downplays the theology of some verses he does use, saying ‘I can’t delete or dispute anything’ from Scripture. With that he obliquely confesses that even the hints of resurrection lingering in the texts are not his own sentiments. At the end of his Requiem the dead are not reborn but released: ‘they rest from their labors.’” I really don’t see how Brahms’ statement that he “can’t delete or dispute anything” from Scripture shows necessarily that Brahms’ did not accept the idea of the resurrection of the dead. Furthermore, Swafford’s language here is rather strange. In Christian theology, the dead are not “reborn”—such a word suggests reincarnation, which is decidedly not a Christian belief. In addition, despite what Swafford seems to be saying, there is no logical inconsistency in believing that the dead “rest from their labors” and that they are resurrected—in fact, in Christian belief the dead rest from their labors on earth in their heavenly existence. Perhaps Swafford should have stuck to musicology and avoided displaying his rather shaky understanding of theology!
Finally, even assuming it is true that Brahms was an agnostic and sought to reflect that fact in his choice of texts for his Requiem, the fact remains that in order to achieve his goal of bringing comfort to “those that mourn” in his work, he was unable to avoid using the words of the Lord Jesus Himself or those words intended to console believers in Him. This just goes to show that the power of the word of God cannot ultimately be appropriated by human beings with their own agenda. The English poet Francis Thompson spoke of God as the “Hound of Heaven,” from whom we can never really escape. Neither can we escape from the truth contained in His words!