A Canadian of Cuban origin, Luis Ernesto Peña Laguna was born in Las Tunas, a small city located between Camagüey and Holguín, and nicknamed the “Ciudad de las Esculturas” (“City of Sculptures”). Excelling at music studies, he earned several degrees in Cuba, most notably in choral and orchestral conducting, musical education, and composition. In 2017, he received a master’s degree in composition from the Université de Montréal.
Peña has had a brilliant career as a composer and choral conductor in Canada and abroad. His wide-ranging catalog includes orchestral compositions, chamber music, and choral works. He has also made more experimental forays into the electro-acoustical, theatrical, choreographic, and multidisciplinary worlds. Active as an educator, teacher, and speaker, he has authored a number of musicological articles and works.
In 2021, the Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal commissioned Peña to write a choral work in tribute to the victims of COVID-19 and intended to be programmed with Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem. In composing Oraison, Peña was inspired by the poem “Danse humaine,” written for the occasion by French author Jean-A. Massard (b. 2000). As the composer explains:
There’s a word that’s very present in my composition, and that word is gestes (“gestures”). It’s a word that resonates with me when I think about the pandemic and how Canada and specifically Quebec managed it. The composition ends just like it begins … a way of representing each wave, how the pandemic is cyclic and still not over. The use of several languages (Latin, French, English, and Spanish) speaks to the fact that COVID has affected the entire planet.
—Claudio Ricignuolo
Ein deutsches Requiem is Brahms’s longest and most personal work, and the one that first put him on the stage as an internationally renowned composer. Despite its length, ambition, complexity, and arduous composition—it took nearly a dozen years to complete—it is also one of his most glowing and accessible pieces. From its opening in the depths of the string section through the last gentle harp flourish, it envelops the listener in some of Brahms’s most memorable melodies, harmonies, and counterpoint. We don’t so much listen to this piece as float through it.
All the great requiems are eccentric in one way or another, and Brahms’s fits the symphonic requiem tradition perfectly in that it is determinedly non-dogmatic. Those by Berlioz, Verdi, Fauré, Delius, and Ligeti are by nonbelievers or agnostics, or what in Verdi’s day were simply called freethinkers. There are other oddities as well. Verdi’s Requiem is decidedly operatic; Berlioz’s is a massive experiment in special effects and novel orchestration; Mozart’s was never finished and turned out to be his own requiem.
The requiem on this program is unique as well. Brahms did use a religious text—his own assemblage of excerpts from Luther’s translation of the Bible—but deliberately left out explicit references to Christ because he wanted the piece to be universal rather than doctrinal. Brahms maintained that it really should have been called a “Human Requiem” rather than a “German Requiem.” He also wanted to remove his requiem from the world of dread and morbidity that often characterize the genre. This is a work of tranquility and consolation that speaks to the living. Brahms addresses the departed directly only in the final movement, when the sopranos sing “Selig sind die Toten” (“Blessed are the dead”). Brahms’s message is that life goes on; “Death, where is thy sting?,” intoned in the sixth movement, is the climactic moment in the text.
This is not to say the work is without sadness and anguish; the baritone solo in the third movement is full of anxiety; the ominous timpani and dark colors in the second announce what we think will be a depressing funeral march. Yet in both of these movements, the music works its way out of the clouds into a radiance that forecasts works like the Second Symphony. Those expecting fire, brimstone, and a wrathful last judgment will be disappointed.
Ein deutsches Requiem was apparently occasioned by the death of a loved one, but it is not clear whom Brahms was memorializing, a mystery that has never been fully resolved and has helped the piece by making it more universal. In 1857, Brahms began work on what eventually became the second movement but meant it to be part of a symphony, then a piano concerto; in 1861, he decided to use the material for a cantata. Four years later, something terrible and unexpected happened: While in Vienna, he received a telegram from his brother in Hamburg: “If you want to see our mother alive again, come immediately.” He arrived to discover his mother had just died from a stroke.
It makes sense that Brahms meant the requiem to memorialize her, but it is just as possible that he meant it as a testament to his beloved friend and mentor Robert Schumann, who died in an asylum in 1856 after a tragic struggle with mental illness and whose death depressed Brahms greatly. In any case, Brahms transformed the cantata into a requiem on which he continued to work for another four years.
In its sheer length as well as its use of vocal soloists, Ein deutsches Requiem is the closest Brahms ever came to writing an opera—which isn’t close at all. The soprano and baritone solos are deeply expressive but relatively brief. Opera as a form did not suit Brahms’s sensibility. He was a classicist who found himself in the Romantic age, a bit out of kilter with his time. The most sober of the Romantic composers, he was a meticulous craftsman who wrote melody as lyrical as his colleagues’—the beautiful counter-melody to the funeral march is a shining example—but never indulged in glitzy effects or melodramatic arias.
This is an early work, but in many ways it is characteristic of Brahms’s mature style. Already it indulges in dark orchestral colors even when the content is bright. The first movement goes so far as to banish violins and high woodwinds altogether; the silvery transparency of the fourth is striking precisely because it is so different from the other movements. (Brahms does employ a harp, a color not found in his symphonies.)
Brahms’s obsession with symmetry and order is present as well. The music is full of striking echoes and correspondences, both with themes and placement of vocal forces. The first movement corresponds to the last, the second to the sixth, the third to the fifth. In the middle is the popular fourth, a contemplative pastorale. There are also intricate motivic relationships and subtle melodic inversions. The opening three-note motif sung by ascending sopranos—“Selig sind, die da Leid tragen, denn sie sollen getröstet werden” (“Blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted”)—permeates the work in a dizzying variety of transformations. This was a method Brahms picked up from Schumann in the latter’s four symphonies, and one he continued to refine and enlarge. Brahms avoids obvious repetitions, but the melodic material is so memorable it becomes subconscious; the echoes are cunningly disguised but ever-present.
Similarly, the somber viola line at the beginning, based on the shape of a Bach chorale, echoes into the second movement and becomes a Bach-like presence throughout the piece. This is not the only neo-Bachian element. In the third and sixth movements, Brahms delivers spectacular fugues. Only in the finale of the Fourth Symphony did he elsewhere employ such elaborate polyphony.
In the era of Liszt and Wagner, some found this requiem retro and abstract. Indeed, its reception played a crucial role in the Brahms vs. Wagner debates. (George Bernard Shaw, a passionate Wagnerite, quipped that Ein deutsches Requiem “could only have come from the establishment of a first-class undertaker.”) When the first three movements premiered in 1867 with Johann von Herbeck conducting the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, many in the audience booed, though some of the hostility was the result of overloud timpani (“the heathenish noise of the percussion,” in the words of one Wagnerite). The following year, Brahms himself conducted the six-movement version in Bremen Cathedral and was loudly feted, the first great success of his life. After this triumph, he added one more movement, “Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit,” in which the soprano sings the radiant solo that many believe to be a tribute to his mother (“As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.”). The final seven-movement version was unveiled by the Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1869 conducted by Carl Reinecke. The next year it was played numerous times in Germany before enjoying successful premieres in London, St. Petersburg, and Paris, establishing itself rapidly as one of one of the great works in the choral-orchestral repertory.
Requiems from the past often provide music for solemn or traumatic political occasions. Mozart’s Requiem, for example, was performed by Erich Leinsdorf in Washington after the assassination of President Kennedy. Ein deutsches Requiem has a special relevance for New Yorkers as the work chosen by choral director Joseph Flummerfelt for a hastily arranged performance just after 9/11 with the New York Philharmonic. Maestro Kurt Masur wanted to perform Britten’s War Requiem, but Flummerfelt believed the Brahms was more appropriate because of its universality and its message of healing and reconciliation—an eloquent testament to the work’s humanity and timelessness.
—Jack Sullivan