Brahms Requiem and me - Neil Heywood
This second opportunity in my life to sing the Brahms German Requiem took me back to my earliest memories of that wonderful work and the realisation that I have known and loved it for more than 60 years.
Back in Hull in the very early 60s, LPs were a bit of a luxury. You went down to Gough and Davy’s rather grand music shop in Paragon Street, and they would put you in a booth with earphones on and play the disk for you, so that you could sample it before buying. If your pocket money was about 5 shillings a week, a 12 inch LP costing 32s/6d – 38s/6d – that was nearly £2! a major investment However, my brother discovered that Hull Central Libraries periodically sold off worn records from their lending stock at bargain prices, One day he came home with a rather tatty DG double LP record of the German Requiem which he’d found there. (AI tells me it was the Berlin Phil under Fritz Lehman and the Berlin Motet choir; the soprano was Maria Stader).
Well, I fell in love with it. It was like nothing I had heard before, brought up as I was on a choral diet of Handel and G&S [Gilbert & Sullivan]. The sheer splendour of the music, the stirring fugues and the novel harmonies made me want to share it with my friends in the school choir and orchestra, but they weren’t too impressed; it went on rather too long for them, although the loud bits were quite exciting. Nobody stayed to the end when I played them the whole thing.
At university in London, my musical horizons expanded greatly. Otto Klemperer could be seen conducting the Philharmonia at the Festival Hall, only a short bus ride away. I heard Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing lieder there too. I joined a church choir and found it was the one where Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Dearmer had compiled the English Hymnal. I often found myself sitting among the basses next to a young Cambridge student called John Rutter, whose family lived nearby. Brahms was not forgotten, but he had a lot of competition for my musical attention by then.
We must now fast forward half a century to 2015 when I was living near Royston; my lovely wife Sarah was terminally ill, and virtually all my time was spent caring for her. I brought her along in her wheelchair to all the RCS concerts and though I would have loved to sing with them, it seemed impossible. Then I heard that RCS were planning to perform the German Requiem under their new conductor Andrew O’Brien, and I realised that this was an opportunity I could not possibly miss. Tuesday night was my only night off in the week, when neighbours come to sit with Sarah so that I could go to my Rotary club; but I would never have a chance to sing the Requiem again. So I joined RCS, and it was nearly all I had hoped for – though not quite all, because the four-handed piano reduction cannot compare with the wonderful orchestral original.
And now there’s to be another performance, this time with a full orchestra. I don’t have a very long bucket list, but this one is definitely in there, and near the top too, so I can tick it off with grateful thanks to Andrew and the Royston Choral Society for allowing me to do it again.
Two months after that 2015 performance, Sarah died, and ‘Wie Lieblich sind Deine Wohnungen’ was among the music I chose for her funeral service.
