One should be wary, I think, about comparing timings from one
performance to another. In this case, though, it’s interesting,
and perhaps even instructive. Rudolf Kempe, in Berlin in 1955,
takes 11:45 over the first movement of the German Requiem.
Kurt Masur, on the other hand, just as solidly Germanic, one
might think, in a concert performance recorded in New York almost
exactly forty years later, gets through it in 8:59. The whole
work lasts a fraction over an hour under Masur; Kempe adds more
than a quarter of an hour to that timing. This reflects a shift
in the way the work is perceived by conductors nowadays, but
there is much more to it than that, as this performance shows.
Essentially a consolatory, hopeful work, clearly slow, lugubrious
tempo are out, replaced by fleet, forward-moving speeds and
more transparent textures. We probably have John Eliot Gardner
to thank for this: his Philips recording from 1990 was widely
announced as representing a new way of seeing the German
Requiem. It is certainly a superb performance, magnificently
well played and sung, but the praise on its release was not
by any means universal. On the contrary, some critics thought
it simply wrong-headed. Other similar performances followed
in its wake, however, and as the example of Masur shows, from
German conductors as well as foreign ones. Let’s have a look
at a couple more timings. For the second movement, Kempe takes
15:47, whereas Masur would appear to dispatch it in a mere 11:48;
and in the final movement, which shares much of the first movement’s
musical material, Kempe takes 13:14, Masur, 9:14. Gardner’s
speeds fall generally between these two extremes, frequently,
but not exclusively, closer to Masur than to Kempe. Otto Klemperer
was no speed merchant, but the tempi in his classic EMI recording
of 1961are generally faster than those of Kempe, though slower
than those of Gardner. Of modern performances I have heard,
the only conductor who approaches Kempe in terms of tempi is
Giuseppe Sinopoli.
A conductor should certainly take care not to stretch the audience’s
patience too far in the German Requiem. The first two
movements, in particular, are very long and contain a fair amount
of repeated material. The music must never drag or – heaven
forbid – plod, nor should any suggestion of heaviness be tolerated.
Mourning plays little part in this piece; or rather it does,
but in a particular sense. The opening words, for example, Christ’s
own from the Sermon on the Mount, are rendered in the New
English Bible as “How blest are the sorrowful; they shall
find consolation.” And consolation, rather than the promise
of eternal life, is the message that one retains after reading
the very personal selection of Biblical texts the composer assembled.
This is a Requiem with no tolling bells, no light everlasting
and no day of wrath - though admittedly, the trumpet does sound.
I have known and studied the German Requiem for many
decades, ever since I sang “How lovely are thy dwellings” in
the school choir, to be precise. In recent years I came to the
conclusion that the Gardner revolution was a positive one, whilst
at the same time retaining an admittedly irrational preference
for what I still believe to be the finest recorded performance
of the work, that of Klemperer. But this Kempe reading has once
again made me stop and think. Above all it provides, once again,
a corrective to musical dogma. There is no one way to perform
a masterpiece. By rights, at several points, especially in the
first two movements, the listener’s attention should be wandering.
But Kempe’s control of the drama of the piece is masterly, and
this simply doesn’t happen. There is far greater variety of
tempo than is the way nowadays, with more slowing at the ends
of phrases and important sections. But when one looks at the
score there always seems to be a reason, usually a musical one,
for what the conductor does. To give just a single example of
this drawn from the many in my notes, I’d like to draw attention
to the fugal passage at the end of the third movement. Kempe
slows down enormously here, and much sooner than is the fashion
nowadays, thus making far greater sense of the quavers in the
tenor and bass parts which appear in these final bars. Some
listeners will think he slows down too much in the final pages
of the second movement, where Brahms’ only indication of tempo
change is to add the word tranquillo. But the close of
the movement is, in this performance, as powerful and moving
as I have ever heard it, more than justifying Kempe’s tempo
choices.
Elisabeth Grümmer sings her solo beautifully, full-throated,
womanly and ardent, not at all the pure, maiden-like voice favoured
in more recent performances. Fischer-Dieskau is magnificent,
just as he was for Klemperer six years later, and perhaps even
more vivid and moving when he asks to know the measure of his
days. The choir, one or two brief moments of sinking pitch in
the sopranos apart, are outstanding, as is the orchestra, both
groups clearly gripped by the conductor’s vision. The recording
is obviously limited, and there is a fair amount of hiss at
times. I’m no fan of historical recordings as a rule, frequently
finding unconvincing the argument that the truth of a performance
shines through the limitations in sound. In this case it did,
no doubt thanks to the remarkable skill of Mark Obert-Thorn,
and I’m confident that if you go with the performance the sound
will not bother you. I wish, though, that in restoring historical
recordings, engineers would allow a few seconds of hiss before
the first notes of a work or a movement within a work, thus
allaying the suspicion that the attack of the very first note
has been cut off.
Malcolm Walker’s excellent note dealing with the work and the
performers adds to the value of an outstanding issue which really
should not be missed.
William Hedley
see also review by Göran
Forsling
Elisabeth Grümmer (soprano); Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (baritone)
