by Kelly Kruse
Composed in 1868, the Brahms Requiem was the first work of its kind in German. A Requiem is a traditional Mass for the dead, but this liturgical form became a musical genre in its own right, and one that many composers sought to master, for sacred or secular reasons. What makes the Brahms Requiem unique is the absence of traditional Latin liturgical texts and the use, instead, of texts from the Luther Bible. Brahms also never makes direct mention of Jesus, which became a point of contention for many people when the work premiered. Brahms, finding himself situated in a post-enlightenment world, could be quite ambiguous and even evasive when discussing his religious beliefs. Some historians believe he was an agnostic, and therefore the Brahms Requiem, though set to biblical texts, has often been viewed as a humanist rather than religious work. As a visual artist, my first body of work, All Flesh is Grass, was inspired by the biblical texts and structures chosen by Brahms for this work. The following essay integrates material adapted from previous writing I have done on my experience with the work. I have written extensively on the Requiem here, including background on Brahms and a movement by movement meditation on the work.
Throughout this essay, I will refer to things that are happening in Movement Two of the Brahms Requiem. Here’s a great recording if you’d like to listen. I highly recommend headphones or speakers cranked up. There are intense louds and softs in classical music, often more so than other genres.
I provide specific timings and comments in the endnotes for you if you’d like to know exactly where I am when I’m discussing musical moments.
I first heard Ein Deutsches Requiem, the monumental choral and orchestral work by Romantic composer Johannes Brahms, when I was twenty-five years old. I was in the last year of my graduate study at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. I had been studying music intensively for eleven years at that point, and I was no stranger to Brahms. Despite all of my semesters of Music History and my love of Brahms, at that point in my life I only knew a handful of his solo piano works, his art songs, his violin concerto, and his four magnificent symphonies. I had heard of his Requiem, but I had never experienced it firsthand.
In retrospect, I’m grateful I walked into the experience without having heard any of the music before. I did not know God personally at this point in my life, although I felt there was most certainly a God. Even the act of listening to music seemed to connect me to an unseen, invisible source in the universe. Performing music, at its best, meant I could be a vehicle for this unseen beauty. To this day, my experience of music remains heady and complex in an intellectual and emotional way that is utterly unlike any other art form.
Many artists I’ve met describe a connection to the unseen that is visceral. I have come to describe this sensation with a single word, Sehnsucht. Sehnsucht is a German word that translates to longing, but what it really describes is a homesickness for a place we’ve never been. C.S. Lewis describes this sensation beautifully in The Weight of Glory. For me, the experience of listening to Brahms is filled with Sehnsucht.
I attended that performance of the Brahms Requiem at IU with my best friend and studiomate, Laura. Laura’s faith defined her life, her ambition, her longings, and her art. She and I had many formative conversations while we were in graduate school. She sat with me in my doubts and unbelief and helped me to know God. My first evening with the Brahms Requiem, sitting next to the woman who would baptize me a few years later, was electrifying.
Like many people, I have vivid memories of the time and place in my life when I first heard a piece of music. On my seventeenth birthday, I heard the Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis for the first time, a piece that is seventeen minutes of unadulterated Sehnsucht, filled with cavernous expanses of darkness, light, and beauty. I used to lay on the floor in the orchestra room in high school with headphones during my study hall, closing my eyes and disappearing from all reality into that auditory world. I was warned by mentors and older musicians that I could become numb to that electrifying sensation of music the more I studied it and intellectualized it. They said I would have less tearful responses, less goosebumps, and less wonder. While in some ways, there could be some truth to that idea, I think I was talking to the wrong people.
The moment I heard the first bars of the Brahms Requiem that evening, I lit up inside. The second movement, in particular, took me on an emotional rollercoaster. I was captivated, haunted, and elated. It reduced me to tears. I didn’t read any of the translations of the German text that evening. There was no intellectual grasp of a spiritual message, no deeper meaning, just a pure sensation of the invisible made auditory. The music overtook me. I spent weeks afterward in the music library listening to recordings of the second movement in particular, trying to integrate that experience of the music into my body.
Not long after this experience, I graduated and grappled with the direction I would take in my life. Like many young artists, I felt pulled in many directions, unsure of how to make a life out of art. I moved from Indiana to Kansas City. I went months without listening to classical music during some of my early years in Kansas City, too distracted trying to make ends meet to sit saturated in beauty. I began to seek God more deeply, and eventually, his Spirit came alive in me. I began to understand that Sehnsucht was a longing for him, for the far off country of perfect relationship with him. It was like my entire life my sight had been out of focus, like the experience of being at the eye doctor with the wrong lens. The doctor snaps the right lens into place, and suddenly what was fuzzy and indistinct has sharp edges and a shape. God’s presence in my life gave these powerful, indistinct forces of beauty a shape. His shape.
The Brahms Requiem changed forever for me when I woke up one morning in the summer of 2014 after a gut-wrenching nightmare about the death of a close family member. It was one of those dreams where I woke up and felt the physical weight of grief and stress because my brain experienced the same neurological effects as I would in waking life. I made myself get out of bed to go for my morning walk on a trail near my home, eyes straining in the darkness of late summer dawn. That summer I spent most of my four-mile walks listening to sermons, podcasts, and Proverbs, but on this particular day I was still shaken by the grief of my subconscious, and melancholy lingered. I skimmed my music playlists and saw the Brahms Requiem, unlistened to for several years. I was overcome by the desire to press into the feeling of melancholy, so I clicked on it. The shuffle feature pulled up movement two, the same movement I had been obsessed with years before.
Despite my powerful experiences with this music before, it was like I heard that movement for the first time that day. I looked up the translation of the biblical text and read it as I walked. I let the power of the music overtake me like I used to, but I was a different woman than I was the first time I had heard it. I had stood in the valley of the shadow of death at the funerals of friends too young to die. I had made a transition from a spiritual seeker to a woman captivated by God. I had battled deep depression, crippling anxiety, and disillusionment with my life. I had walked with those close to me through battles with mental health and addiction. I had watched friends divorce, have miscarriages, die of cancer, and bury their children, and I had yet to turn thirty. My eyes were wide open to the brokenness of a world that is not functioning the way it was meant to. One of the best biographies on Brahms, written by Jan Swafford, says that he wrote the opening theme for the second movement (intended for a symphony) the day that one of his best friends, Robert Schumann, jumped from a bridge and attempted to end his life (1). Brahms was living with the Schumanns at the time, and he was a witness to the pain of Schumann’s decline and eventual death from mental illness. Schumann left behind his wife, Clara, also a famous musician, and eight children.
That morning on the trail, I was disarmed and vulnerable from my dream. I felt the tears well up as the choir began its muted declaration of Isaiah 40:6 (2).
“All flesh is grass,
and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades…”
By the time it reached its first great and terrible climax (3), my tears flowed freely. It was the only reaction I could have to the powerful reality of death that Brahms had covered with his thick, powerful harmonic voice. The music creates a very real sense of the relentless force of death in the listener, to create an irresistible wave of sound that you are powerless to stop. It gave me the ability to see the world through a clear lens as a thing whose most shimmering pinnacles will inevitably be overcome by the ash of death. Though our beauty is as delicate and matchless as the most precious flower, we are ultimately just like that flower and will wither, all color will drain from us, and we will eventually be returned to the dust. Thankfully, Brahms gives us a glimpse into the hope that God provides us in his choice of the next text for the second movement, James 5:7 (4).
Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains.
The music lightens and lilts, as though to let sunlight through the clouds. At the ends of the two musical sections of this interlude, the underlying music pulls at the ends of this hope, attempting to unravel it. Brahms does successfully unravel it eventually, dragging us back into the dark beauty of his setting of Isaiah’s words once again (5). That morning, it became clear to me that this musical theme, though I had already heard it, seemed to sting more, and it almost felt cruel. I thought of Lazarus, raised from the dead. I couldn’t help but think about the fact that though Lazarus was raised, he still died a physical death again. If he didn’t outlive his sisters, they had to mourn him again. And if we are healed from sickness, eventually we will have to mourn the loss of our health again. So where is the hope that endures forever?
The crescendo into Brahms’ repeated climax of the death march theme was much more devastating to me the second time around. Still crying in the early dawn, I stopped walking, overcome by even deeper hopelessness. Not only was I feeling residual sadness from my dream, I was also flooded with real memories of burying loved ones. There was yet another layer of deeper mourning as the music exposed anticipatory grief in me. If I live long enough, I will one day bury my parents and countless others who are close to me. This is a cruel reality for all of humanity and a concept that we often hold at a distance, something our logical minds recognize but that is kept carefully walled off, inaccessible, so that it will not crush us.
It occurred to me that day that Brahms, through his chosen texts and the way he sets them, brutally and masterfully reveals the realities we face, whether in the past, present, or future. If art is only saccharin and sentimental, it feels flimsy and transparent in the face of life's difficult realities. If we buy into the conventionally beautiful and comfortable side of our faith only, denying the existence of death, when we are overcome with the unavoidable reality of it we may crumble irreparably. It is not uncommon for our faith to crumble in tandem. I'm not saying we should spend our time only dwelling on sin, brokenness, and death. Our fragile human souls are not built to carry that kind of weight. We must partake in the transforming joy that God offers us, or all we have left is the reality of this world’s passing, whether it is delayed, put off, or sentimentalized. No matter which of those three methods we choose, we aren’t really capable of dealing fully with the ramifications of death. We can attempt to numb the feelings of grief or anger by religious or irreligious means.
The fact remains: regardless of our individual belief systems or cultural constructs, we all must reckon with death. As the voices decrescendo and fade with the music at the end of this second statement of Isaiah 40, there is a sliver of silence and pause - just enough that you almost think it ends there, in death and despair (6). That morning I spent on the walking trail, my soul felt like it did end there. I had forgotten what came next. Brahms had yet to set the second half of verse eight.
Aber des Herrn Wort bleibet in Ewigkeit. (But the word of the Lord endures forever.)
Brahms does not leave us with the heaviness of death crushing our hearts, because God doesn’t leave us there, either. A unison "ABER!" shattered the momentary silence through my earphones, and I heard something I hadn't heard before, though I had listened to this work literally hundreds of times (7). The new lens snapped into place and I found clarity. The gospel offers a 'but.' We all must suffer, and there will be death, but..! The Word of the Lord endures forever.
Jesus is called the word made flesh. Jesus endured. His body was put in the tomb to rot. Aber—But!—he rose from the dead. He conquered death, not just for his own human body, but for mine, too. According to scripture, Jesus lived the life that we should have lived, and in his human flesh, died the death that we should have died (completely forsaken by God, pained, humiliated, and alone). God entered the world to be what we could not be to do what we could not do. Suddenly I found myself crying for a different reason. Tears of joy were replacing the tears of sorrow, my very own Psalm 126 (a Psalm which Brahms sets in the first movement). He closes the second movement with a promise from Isaiah 35:10 (8).
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain gladness and joy,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
If we cannot escape the penalty of death and brokenness by ourselves, then the only way we could do it is to be ransomed. The good news is that we have been ransomed. My weeping can truly be converted to songs of joy. That day on the trail, as Brahms' almost-fugue raced triumphantly to the close of movement two, I found myself weeping tears of joy. The words that Brahms stretches out and sets over and over again at the end of the work are Freude, ewige Freude, or Joy, eternal Joy! This is the power of music, for me. It softens and disarms me, and it leaves me open to the power and truth of God’s word, and then its unseen forces seem to enter my body, helping me to physically and emotionally process these complex theological concepts. As we grow and change in faith, our perceptions of art grow and change with us. The art waits, ever ripe fruit that God offers as ways to taste and see that He is good.
Kelly working on a piece for her series All Flesh Is Grass.
Kelly Kruse is a visual artist, singer, and arts educator living in Kansas City, Missouri. She uses her work to explore the painful, beautiful experience of human transience, longing, and suffering. She developed a visual devotional practice as a response to her battle with depression, through which she wrestles with beauty, history, and theology. Kruse describes her work as contemporary illumination. Like the medieval monks who perfected the art of illuminated manuscripts, she seeks to awake in the viewer a sense of spiritual contemplation. Her first exposure to the idea of illumination came when she studied Medieval and Renaissance music in Italy. Her background in classical music and opera puts her in a unique position to explore the intersections between scripture, poetry, musical works, and the visual arts.
She has exhibited her work at galleries and institutions across the country and her work is featured in collections around the world.
In addition to her painting practice, Kelly is an active classical musician and maintains a private studio as a member of the National Association of Teachers of Singing. She has lectured in music history in addition to serving as a masterclass teacher and clinician.
You can view Kelly’s artwork at www.kellykrusecreative.com and follow her on Instagram at @kellykrusecreative.
Music Endnotes:
1. 0:00-0:45 - listen for the pedal timpani, a hallmark of Brahms’ style. Throughout the entire work, especially in movement three, you’ll hear pedal timpani that can serve as a reminder of the relentlessness of death. Timpani are pitched percussion instruments, and so using them as a pedal (continuous) tone causes them to clash occasionally with harmonies above them.
2. 1:15-2:20 - This is the first statement of “Den alles fleisch est is wie Gras, or “For all flesh is like grass.” Listen for the “blooming” swells in the music, mimicking the beauty of flower opening.
3. 2:55-3:35 - By the end of this climactic moment, the music fades and falls alway, like the grass.
4. 4:00-5:00+: Here, the textures thin and the music becomes more light and transparent, like the clearing of clouds. We’ve shifted from B-flat minor into G-flat major. Rhythmically, it is much more like a graceful dance than a death march. In a sense, this section feels more dreamlike than the first.
5. 5:28-5:45: The happy melody of hope melts away and back into the death march. In a way, this repetitive form mimics the cyclical nature of life and death. The structure of this work is A(musical idea one), B (musical idea two), A (a return to the first idea), and then it has a fugue-like C section tacked on the end.
6. 920-9:30 - the work sounds like it may be coming to an end here.
7. 9:30-9:57 - a complete break in the texture and a jarring key change from B-flat minor to B-flat major.
8. 9:58-end - a triumphal fugue-like ending featuring heroic soaring melodies and imitation between some vocal lines. There are subdued moments where it almost seems like it could collapse back into the darkness from the beginning, but joy always wins out.
This post is part of an ongoing series where we ask artists and arts professionals to share a piece of artwork that has significantly impacted their formation as a Christian.