Johannes Brahms’s father married his housekeeper, seventeen years his senior, and Johannes Brahms was the second of their three children. Given the family’s straitened circumstances, the young Johannes was compelled to play the piano in houses of ill repute, and as a result saw the seamier side of life. These were crucial times for his developing nature, and as an adult, he became a very reserved and introspective man with a complex personality. He was devastated by his parents’ divorce in 1864 and his mother’s death a year later. All these events are significant in the genesis of Ein deutsches Requiem.

Brahms’s German Requiem is a deeply personal response to the Mass for the Dead. As a humanist and agnostic, he related the work to death without using either the liturgical Latin text or the traditional musical structure of the Requiem Mass. Brahms selected the words himself from the German Bible and the Apocrypha; there is no mention anywhere of Christ nor emphasis upon personal redemption through the Crucifixion, the texts offering instead consolation for those who mourn. He described his Requiem in a letter to Clara Schumann as ‘a kind of German Requiem’.

Ein deutsches Requiem was premiered in 1867.The full seven-movement version we know today, first performed in 1869, became perhaps not only a memorial to his mother but also a gesture of conclusion to the first half of his life.The second chapter would bring him greater fame and success, but the German Requiem was the watershed.