nite
herald of revolt. The mere title, 'A German Requiem', involving the
commandeering of the name hitherto associated exclusively with the
ritual of the Roman Church and the practice of prayers for the dead, and
its adaptation to entirely different words, was in itself of the utmost
significance; and the significance was enhanced by the character of the
words themselves. In the first place, they were self-selected on purely
personal lines; in the second place, they were, theologically, hardly so
much as Unitarian. Brahms claimed the right to express his own
individual view of the problem, and at a length which involved the
corollary that the problem was regarded in its completeness. The 'German
Requiem' cannot be considered, as an anthem might be, as an expression
of a mere portion of a complete conception of the particular religious
problem: in an organic work of this length, what it does not assert it
implicitly denies or at any rate disregards. And this was at once
recognized, both by Brahms's opponents and by himself: he categorically
refused to add any dogmatically Christian element to his scheme.
Similarly with his _Ernste Gesaenge_, written some thirty years later, at
the end of his life: he balances the reflections on death taken from
Ecclesiastes and similar sources with the Pauline chapter on faith,
hope, and charity--not with any more definite consolation. And again,
with the choral works, the settings of Hoelderlin's _Schicksalslied_,
Schiller's _Naenie_, Goethe's _Gesang der Parzen_ (the first-fruits of
the essentially modern spirit which has impelled so many composers to
choral settings of great poetry)--they deal with the ultimate things,
but the expression is never, so to speak, orthodox: it is imaginative,
sometimes perhaps ironical, but never anything but intensely
non-ecclesiastical.

Brahms's Requiem represents, as I have said, the beginning of the change
in the conception of concert-room religious music, of the abandonment of
the old type of oratorio in favour of something much more conscious and
individual; and in refusing to take things for granted, religious music
has been altogether in line with general religious development. The
change can perhaps be observed in English music more markedly than
elsewhere. Oratorio, in the sense in which we ordinarily use the term,
is to all intents and purposes an invention of the genius of Handel
reacting on his English environment: the form was of course old