Brahms Requiem - Promising Purpose through the Pain

Last weekend, on Saturday, I was at the Houston Sympony's Brahms' Requiem in which I had one of the most timeless experiences. Such experiences happen when art can truly create a shift in one's consciousness. The thing about such consciousness shift is that one cannot quite nail down why it happened. All one can do is look back, ponder, wonder and try to make as much sense of it as is possible. So this post is my trying to make sense of why Brahms requiem was so deeply meaningful for me. Houston Symphony did a brilliant job of having quotes from Desmond Tutu to Bob Dylan about concerns about life and death before each movement, adding poignancy to the experience. 

Brahms wrote this Requiem as a commemoration of his Mom's passing away. Having listened to this rendition of Brahms Requiem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIw2DUM-3kU my sense was that Movement II was going to be my point of deepest resonance because it was so full of pathos - getting a sense of the full force of life's fragile beauty. 

At the symphony, I was sitting close to the front, the right of the orchestra, close to the bases so got the best treatment of Movement II. Movement II starts with the growling of the deep strong bass, which to me is an expression of long suffering resilient grief. Then the whole choir joins in singing a full throated acknowledgment "For all flesh is grass the glory of man is like the flowers," communicating pain, sorrow and angst. Eventually, the brass comes in with the triumphant a sense of comfort and encouragement sustained by the deep assurance that, "the word of the Lord endures to eternity," thus ending Movement II with the hope of a new joy blossoming out of the grief.  I thought I had reached my emotional climax, and the rest of the requiem was going to go into the denouement. Oh! how I was wrong!

When I was listening to this piece live, it was movement III that has me overwhelmed. That is when I had the true consciousness shift, into the realm of the timeless. I cannot quite explain or describe how it happened, but I am going to try just to see what comes out... And so I am left with nothing but to philosophize on the possibilities. buckle up!

Movement III starting with the soloist singing, "Lord, teach me that I must have an end, and my life has a purpose, and I must accept this," made me perk up. I think this singular voice personalized the pathos for me. It was like my own prayer to God to find my own grounding purpose to accept my own life in all its fancies and frailties. The meaning of the music had shifted. The then deeply personalized sounds of the instruments, the soloist and the choir took me on a journey inside my own psyche, which I am loss for words to describe. I had gotten as close to experiencing timelessness as I could is all I can say. 

I think what I experienced in movement III is what the existential philosophers would call an encounter with one's own finiteness - but without making this finitude a form of fatalism. After having sung the pain and the pathos out in Movement II, at the start of Movement III when the soloist sang, "Lord, teach me that I must have an end, and my life has a purpose, and I must accept this," to me this is an attempt to find a new grounding to live on, not letting pain have the final word. At times, Life is pain, sometimes to push through the pain one has to find a ground from which to push through the pain. The tricky part is, when one is in pain it is difficult to find that ground from which to push through the paint to emerge into new life. 

At such a time, when one is deep pain, but cannot yet find the grounding to move through it, all one can do is lament which is what I think Movement II does. It is a lament fully acknowledging the pain. As any therapist worth his/her salt would say, the first task of grief process is acknowledging the pain of the situation. Different cultures use different rituals to acknowledge the pain. In some subcultures in India, where I am from, if a close family member dies, then those in the family would mourn for a few months or even a year by wearing white dress. The lament itself is a communal process, which involves wailing rituals. The western culture, especially American, where one has to keep moving quickly or be run over by the mighty wheel of compulsive productivity, making time and space to acknowledge pain and mourn is difficult. To me, Movement II was this kind of communal ritual of wailing to show solidarity with the sorrow, paving the compassionate pathway for eventual recovery. There is a deep blessing in mourning well, because grief well weathered fosters strength. This is precisely why Brahms requiem starts with Jesus' beatitude, "blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."

After having acknowledged the pain in Movement II, the individual, stands before God afresh to reckon with the deep truth of life, confronting one's own limitedness - acknowledging that there is an end to life. But also seeing that the end is on that is purposeful. Kierkegaard, considered the father of Existentialist thinking, says in his book, Fear and Trembling, that a key aspect of living the passionate life to do a double movement of resignation and faith - resignation in acknowledging that life is limited and painful, yet, faith that life can still be purposeful. At the start of Movement III when the soloist sang, "Lord, teach me that I must have an end, and my life has a purpose, and I must accept this," in a sense he is performing this Kierkegaard double move or resignation to the frailty of life and faithfulness to the bigger purpose of life. It is this bigger purpose that gives one the new grounding to push through the pain and walk on.

Here is the thing, if someone had recited out the verses of the requiem to me, I would have gone... "interesting, ok," I wouldn't have been moved. What moved me, caused my consciousness shift is the power of music that has endured the test of time. There is enormous power in hearing a 100 human voices and a 100 instrumental sounds sing out with singular focus. This is why it makes sense that Beethoven ends his Magnum Opus, Symphony 9 with the Ode to Joy which bring the power and pathos of the choral and the instrumental traditions. The power of Brahms's Requiem is that he poured out his own psychic pain into the music, which in turn opened up the painful portals of my own psyche, taking me on a journey to finding a new grounding, a new blessedness of hope in the purposefulness of life. This shouldn't be surprising for Brahms wrote this piece as a way of externalizing his own grief over the death of his mother. 

What is astounding to me is how Brahms's music speaks to me, even though I, having been born in India, am as removed as one can be from the traditions of Western classical music. My acquaintanceship with Western classical music started in earnest when I got a Houston Symphony student pass and used it with reckless abandon a couple of year ago. The language of music is the language of the human psyche. Genius artists are ones who have a deep grasp of how the work of art, born authentically out of human pathos can speak empathically to the universal human condition. I think some where in the mystical realms between Movement II and Movement III was teleported into the timeless realm of my own conscientiousness and experienced a shift that resolved some deep angst within, helping me reemerge a more grounded individual with a deeper faith in, "the word of the Lord (that) endures for eternity," promising purpose through the pain. 

If you want to commit another random act of reading my ramblings on classical music, a similar layman analysis on Tchaikovsky's Symphony #5 here.