BRATTLEBORO — Given that Susan Dedell is the director of the Brattleboro Concert Choir and Orchestra, it isn't too surprising that when she speaks about her “enduring and evolving first love,” she is referring not to some remarkable person from her past, but rather to a piece of choral music: Johannes Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem.
“Brahms' German Requiem is music that is both triumphant and full of joy, even frisky at times, all unusual things for a requiem,” Dedell says. “There is an eternal freshness about the piece. This requiem faces the full complications of life, sort of like our American spirituals, never totally happy or sad, but simultaneously ebullient and willing to acknowledge suffering.”
Dedell will return to this early love when she directs the Brattleboro Concert Choir and Orchestra in Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem on Saturday, Jan. 14, at 7:30 p.m., and the following afternoon at 3 on Sunday, Jan. 15, at the Latchis Theatre in Brattleboro.
“For these performances we have assembled an outstanding orchestra of 36 professionals from across New England, who will join a chorus of 90 singers that sounds fantastic and is totally into the piece,” Dedell says. “We also have two very special soloists.”
Accomplished performers
Baritone soloist Stan Norsworthy has had a long and distinguished career in both opera and oratorio and often has performed the German Requiem with many celebrated choral masters, including Robert Shaw.
Soprano soloist Margery McCrum first sang this work 26 years ago with then-fledgling Concert Choir conductor Susan Dedell, and both are thrilled to revisit the work together.
“The German Requiem goes a long way back with me,” Dedell says.
She initially encountered the much beloved choral work for orchestra, soprano, and baritone solo as a high school student in Michigan. “I was engaged as a rehearsal pianist for an area production,” she says. “At the time I was learning a lot of Brahms on the piano.”
She became smitten with Brahms' music.
Dedell feels that Brahms is a composer to whom young people readily respond. “I do not mean this in any denigrating way, but the less you know about music, the more his work hits you,” she says.
In her first year in college, she was honored to work in the same capacity with Dr. Maynard Klein, renowned Brahms scholar and director of choral arts at the University of Michigan and the Interlochen National Music School. Two years later, she served as his assistant in preparing the university chorus for a production with the Detroit Symphony.
“I was very lucky to work with Maynard Klein,” Dedell adds. “He edited an edition of some of the smaller choral works by Brahms. A fascinating and instructive man, Klein had an interesting background as a jazz musician.” The upcoming performances at the Latchis will be Dedell's third go-around with the German Requiem in the Southern Vermont area.
“The first time I did the work was 26 years ago, when I knew next to nothing about conducting,” she says. “It has been 16 years since I performed this requiem, and now I am looking back [with] new, fresh, and exciting eyes. You might say that the mature me is trying to recapture her past.”
For Dedell, Brahms' Requiem is “a vision of serenity in a world of turmoil.”
A groundbreaking work
She says that it was a groundbreaking work in its day, because “it dared to give voice to humankind's fundamental question in clear language: What is the ultimate meaning of our fleeting existence? Brahms' musical response to that question angered many of the traditionalists of his day, for he failed to answer using traditional religious language or theology.”
The texts all come from the Lutheran translation of the Bible, which is why it is called A German Requiem.
“More vernacular and immediate, very colloquial and folksy, the Lutheran Bible in German is quite different than, say, the King James Version in English,” Dedell says. “On top of that, the texts Brahms chose are not even particularly religious.”
What he chose were woven together to form what Dedell characterizes as a deeply personal psychological poem.
Although his work is called A German Requiem, Brahms himself said, “As far as the text is concerned, I will admit that I would gladly give up the 'German' and simply put 'human.' When he was criticized for his choices, and for his obvious omission of Christian theology, he tartly responded that he wrote the work for himself - that is, to piece together his own response to life's traumas and questions.”
The Requiem is in seven movements. Brahms wrote the first three after the attempted suicide of his good friend, Robert Schumann, and added the remaining four several years later upon the death of his beloved mother.
After reading a recent biography of the composer, Dedell has come to feel that the Requiem had a very personal meaning for Brahms, and that through this work he mourned the “trauma of his adolescence, which left him wary of forming relationships, and trusting in the goodness of others.”
Dedell realizes that Brahms is seldom seen an optimist.
“He was known for his reserved and sometimes prickly personality,” she admits.
Nonetheless, Dedell remains convinced that A German Requiem shows the inner Brahms: “a sensitive and visionary man who could imagine a perfected state of being in which there was no conflict, no pain - only perfected unity.”
Brahms grew up in the slums of Hamburg, the product of a penniless and unsuccessful young musician and his much-older wife.
“They knew they had an exceptionally talented child,” Dedell says, “and provided him with music teachers and as much education as they could afford. To increase the family income, Brahms' father found him jobs playing in the neighborhood bordellos. Slight, blond, and beautiful, the young teenager spent nightmare evenings at the piano, surrounded by drunken sailors and prostitutes who made him witness and sometimes participate in violent and sexual acts.”
'The beauty of nature'
This went on for three years, until a psychologically and spiritually wounded Brahms was sent to live with a relative in the Alpine countryside to recover.
“There, he discovered the beauty of nature, which, along with music, was to become his constant place of healing, inspiration, and escape,” Dedell says.
She finds the fusion of nature into music evident in the colors of Brahms' music: the rich browns of the earth, the changing hues of the sky, the delicate clear colors of meadow flowers. “Everything is always alive, always moving with the current of the atmosphere and the breath,” she says.
This isn't to say that Brahms' music doesn't often delve into the darker tones of struggle or of pathos.
“There is never a sense of morbidity, and almost always a sense of ultimate triumph,” Dedell continues. “His use of instruments, such as violas, horns, and cellos, reflect these colors as well, often contrasting rich inner voices with limpid or sparkling upper winds, or very low notes that undergird a changing upper structure. [It is] large, passionate, physically demanding orchestral playing.”
In much the same way that she responded to his music when a young girl, Dedell still feels Brahms' music attests to his love of, and faith in, the natural world.
But it's more than that.
“Renewing, healing, and evolving, and always alive,” Dedell says, “Brahms' German Requiem expresses a firm belief in the inevitability of justice and an unwavering faith in the power of love.”