'But now, please, use your best words to assure your esteemed fellow members of the great pleasure they have given me and how grateful I am for their kindness. You can easily supply details which I am shy of adding and which, if written, might sound trivial and vain. You, however, are aware that such a friendly token of appreciation and sympathy is a very serious matter....
'Now, with hearty greeting to you and yours,
'Yours most sincerely,
'J. Brahms.'[66]
In his setting of 'Nänie,' dedicated to Frau Henriette Feuerbach and performed from the manuscript at this concert, Brahms has conceived the calm fatalistic spirit of classical antiquity represented in Schiller's funeral dirge as perfectly as he has embodied in the music of the German Requiem the passionate intensity of the writers of the Old and New Testaments. A current of tender pathos glides evenly through the lament, which is somewhat strengthened during the passing image of Aphrodite bewailing the loss of her son, but not sufficiently to disturb the smooth onward flow of the passages proceeding continuously from beginning to end of the work. It seems to suggest the ancient Greek idea of death as the final decree of destiny, hardly to be dreaded, not to be questioned or resisted, immutable even in the presence of beauty, just as clearly as the powerful contrasts of the Requiem present the Biblical conception of death as an enemy to be opposed and finally destroyed in the victory of an all-conquering love.
Dr. Carl Neumann describes a visit paid by him to Frau Feuerbach when she was seventy-five years of age, at her house in Ansbach. He went through two rooms.
'In the first was a grand piano on which lay Brahms' "Nänie"; in the second, one might say, dwelt the departed. Tall green plants stood in the window recesses obscuring the light. What the mother had of her son's works hung on the walls. The coloured sketch of a "Descent of the Cross," a flower study belonging to the time when the frame of "Plato's Feast" was painted, a drawing of the standing Iphigenia looking towards the land of Greece—here was her altar....
'We left this room. She sat down to the piano, at first as if to rest; then asked if I knew Brahms' "Nänie," which, as an admirer of her son's art, he had dedicated to her. She gave me the music to follow and began to play it by heart....
'Suddenly I looked up.... The woman at the piano in the black dress, a black veil on her white hair, seemed changed. The tall figure, bent forward and lost in tones and memories; was it not the tragic muse herself and was she not sounding a song of fate?
'In the spring of 1886 she once again met Brahms and heard "Nänie" under Joachim.'[67]