Schelle, after reviewing the first number sympathetically and the second almost enthusiastically, continues:
'Unfortunately the third is extremely inferior to it [No. 2]; the text demanded a strong increase of effect which the composer has been incapable of giving. The bass solo is not written gratefully for the voice and there is much that is obtrusively bizarre and unedifying in the chorus.... The movement was a failure....'
Hirsch did not fail to make use of his opportunity in the Wiener Zeitung. He speaks of the 'heathenish noise of the kettledrums,' and declares 'in the interest of truth' that the opposition party in the audience had an immense majority.'
The concert is mentioned by Billroth in a letter dated December 24:
'I like Brahms better every time I meet him. Hanslick says, quite rightly, that he has the same fault as Bach and Beethoven; he has too little of the sensuous in his art both as composer and pianist. I think it is rather an intentional avoidance of everything sensuous as of a fault. His Requiem is so nobly spiritual and so Protestant-Bachish that it was difficult to make it go down here. The hissing and clapping became really violent; it was a party conflict. In the end the applause conquered.'
It is characteristic of Brahms that his belief in the future of his work was not diminished by the untoward incidents of this occasion. He looked forward to the result of the coming performance in Bremen with a confidence that was even enhanced by the fact that he had gained experience with respect to the instrumentation of the third chorus.
He sent part of his manuscript to Marxsen with a letter from which the following quotation was first published by Sittard in his 'Studien und Charakteristiken':
'I send you some novelties and beg you, if time allows, to write me one or many words about them. I enclose also something from my Requiem and on this I earnestly beg you to write to me. It looks rather curious in places and perhaps, in order to spare my manuscript, you would take some music paper and put down useful remarks. I should like that very much. The eternal "D" in No. 3. If I do not use the organ it does not sound. There is much I should like to ask. I hope you have time and some inclination; then you will perceive at once what there is to ask and what to say.'
It is, as Hanslick observed, by no means unintelligible that the first part of the German Requiem was not immediately accepted by the general body of listeners assembled at the Gesellschaft concert of December 1, unprepared as they were for the new and important element underlying its conception. The title chosen by the composer was at the time, and has been occasionally since, demurred to as misleading, on account of the long association of the term Requiem with the ritual of the Roman Church. It should, however, be obvious that by the word 'German' departure is indicated from the practice of previous composers, which places the composition in a category of its own and gives to its message an applicableness beyond the limitations of creed. Brahms arranged his own words, and by the fact of doing so, by his inspired musical treatment of his texts, and his direct avoidance of giving to his work an association with a particular church service or a familiar musical form, requiem or mass, cantata or oratorio, has preserved in it, whether or not consciously, an element of personal fervour that constitutes part of the secret of its spell.
The texts, culled from various books of the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha,[24] have been chosen, with entire absence of so-called doctrinal purpose, as parts of the people's book, of Luther's Bible, the accepted representative to Protestant nations of the highest aspirations of man, and have been so arranged as to present in succession the ascending ideas of sorrow consoled, doubt overcome, death vanquished. That they open and close with the thought of love is not of necessity to be ascribed solely to the artistic requirements of the work, or the exigencies of its sacred theme. Whoever has studied Brahms' life and works with sympathetic insight will be aware that the suggestion of love triumphant runs through both like a continuous silver thread, and it is open to those who choose, to accept this as indicative of a faith dwelling within him, which was none the less fruitful for good because it knew nothing of the dogma of the Churches.