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To the memory of Peter Weimar and of Jaroslav Pelikan
Brahms's religious music was a large part of his fame in his lifetime and therefore a large part of his life.1 We must try to understand it as best we can in order to understand Brahms. To do so is not easy, since he was a private person, and it was a rather private religion, Liberal Protestantism in the 19th century being an ever more internal matter, apart, of course, from the (evangelical) Pietists, but Brahms was not one of them.2 He composed religious songs throughout his career. Among his first published vocal music was Ave Maria, Op. 12. As a young man he had founded a women's choir in his hometown and composed Marienlieder (Songs of Mary), Op. 22, hagiographic folksongs for them. His Deutsches Requiem (German Requiem), Op. 45, made him famous, and then he settled in Vienna, the capital of music. His Vier ernste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs), Op. 121, all to the Bible, was last.
Thus, it was early songs in praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Protestant Hamburg followed later by volumes of music to Luther's translation of the Bible in Catholic Vienna. Brahms had a religious itch he scratched continually, and he was a contrarian as well. In later years he supplied a verbal background to his religious music, an epistolary ostinato to a friend indicating how much he sought the "heathen" parts of the Bible.
The further complication is that all this music, from 1858 to 1896, has been examined and volubly commented upon by musicologists, concert program annotators, and reviewers not equipped to understand the biblical texts as Brahms did according to the music he set them to. A large, but tight consensus has nevertheless been built up among Anglo-American musicologists in the matter of Brahms's religion to the effect that essentially he did not have one: his connection with Christianity, let alone Lutheranism, was only "cultural", chiefly North-German cultural.3 This may seem a natural assumption given Brahms's time, place, and intellect (contemporary of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche). It is nonetheless false, based on extensive misconstrual. My purpose is to pull apart the consensus and reopen the question. I begin with the German Requiem.
In face...