Cheap Brahms: Ein deutsches Requiem Op.45 (Music) (Johannes Brahms, Herbert von Karajan, Jose Van Dam, Barbara Hendricks, Rudolf Scholz) Price

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Customer Reviews of Brahms: Ein deutsches Requiem Op.45

Brahms inhabited Karajan's soul as no other composer with the possible exception of Richard Strauss. I have the Symphonies (two versions), the Concertos and now the Requiem. The music is simultaneously beautiful and touching, moving on several levels. I have often wondered about the artists and their fount of inventiveness. What is Brahms "trying to say"? This is not the traditional Requiem of a Verdi, Mozart, Schubert or Beethoven. No, it is more a celebration of the human spirit. If you must get only one version, this is the one. The voices are clear, the orchestra just the right tone, the longing and "Germanenss" of the music stand out above all. It has that haunting forest mood that inhabits so much of Brahm's music.

The mother becomes the Go-Between of Death
In a century entirely dominated by the often brutal progress of man, i.e. a male individual, through industrialization and the invention of railroads, cars, steam engines, the steel industry, coal mines and so many other - often polluting - things, in a century where the male figure of life and death dominates, alienates, exploits all beings, Brahms sings the earth, the growth of nature and grass, the call of the wild and open space, immense space and unlimited time. Brahms calls to his side the feminine, the female mother-earth from which all life and sustenance come and to which all human beings go back for their last sojourn on this planet and for their last comforting home and sleep. Brahms dedicates this Requiem to the mother, the evercomforting woman who can take all suffering men in her embrace, in her arms, in her warm tear-sprinkled patience and understanding, love in a word. Brahms moves the Requiem from the male figure of the Father, God, or the male figure of the sufferer and savior, Jesus, to the female suffering and yet comforting figure of the mother. Brahms is at the antipodes of the German myth : Death is « der Tod », hence masculine, a male character, but Brahms makes it an incarnation of the mother, the archetype of all mothers, of Mary weeping at the foot of the cross. Yet at this moment we remember what the dying Christ said, near the end, to his disciple and his mother : « See, this is your son ! See, this is your mother ! » This reflects the suffering of Brahms in front of a world that is changing too fast and is becoming blindingly inhumane, in front of the loss of his friend Schumann and the loss of his own mother. He is able to recapture his lost past, the love of his mother, the friendship of Schumann, the comforting certainty of mother-earth, in this shifting of a death dominated requiem into a motherly and comforting communion with the very principle of humanity that the mother represents on Earth. In fact he goes back to the old Romanic and Romanesque tradition of the mother church in the Middle Ages and rediscovers the mother in a male dominated Germanic world.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Perpignan

Singing, tuneful performance
I just compared Klemperer/Gardiner/3 Karajan's versions/Masur/Barenboïm /Shaw. This is the one I prefer because of the singing tempo, the articulation is just superb, very tuneful. If only, the solists were rather the Janovitch & Meyer combo of another Karajan's version but whose rythm is too flat & bland compared to this one, the ideal match would be met. I also really liked Rodney Gilfry in Gardiner's version & Janet Williams in Barenboïm's.