Approximately 18 minutes

Composer: Born May 7, 1833, Hamburg; died April 7,
1897, Vienna

Work composed: 1868-1871

World premiere: Brahms conducted the premiere in Karlsruhe on October 18, 1871

Instrumentation: SATB chorus, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and strings

In 1868, Johannes Brahms traveled to the northern German city of Oldenberg to visit friends. While there, he came across the 1798 poem “Hyperions Schicksalslied,” (Hyperion’s Song of Destiny) by the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Brahms, reportedly “stirred to his depths” by Hölderlin’s words, began sketching music for Schicksalslied that same afternoon.

Hölderlin’s poem contrasts the serenity of “heavenly ones” untroubled by the vagaries of fate, who gaze outward with an eternal calm, with the unpredictable, sometimes tormentedexperiences of humans on earth (“Suffering humans decline and blindly fall from one hour to the next … down into the Unknown.”). The philosophical implications of these verses appealed to Brahms, who had completed his humanistic, ecumenical German Requiem three years earlier. Brahms intended his Requiem to speak to as wide a circle of people as possible, and offer solace to the living, rather than exalt the dead. To that end, Brahms pointedly omitted any references to Jesus Christ in the texts he set, but instead focused on the consoling nature of a universal God.

In Schicksalslied, Brahms continued this philosophical journey, to the point that he musically transformed Hölderlin’s conclusion of despair into a serene meditation on the up-and-down nature of a life that offers some hope even when all feels hopeless. Brahms, aware that his own beliefs contradicted Hölderlin’s words, remarked, “I am saying something the poet does not say.”

Musically, Brahms accomplishes this by faithfully reflecting the emotions Hölderlin’s three-verse poem evokes. After the chorus finishes singing Hölderlin’s words, however, Brahms adds an orchestral postlude, a partial reprise of the sereneintroduction. The timpani, as in the Requiem, provide a human heartbeat that softly pulses throughout. Using the timpani, Brahms subtly links divine ecstasy with human tribulation, suggesting, unlike Hölderlin, that the distance between them is not impossible to bridge.