This Sunday (June 5th) at 10:00 am, the MPC Choir will present their spring major choral work: a performance of Schicksalslied by Johannes Brahms. Also known as The Song of Destiny, it is considered by many to be his finest choral work. The choir will be joined by members of the Exeter String Quartet, including MPC’s own Rich Larsen. We hope you can join us for what is sure to be a beautiful and stirring musical performance.
About Schicksalslied
From the San Francisco Choral Society website:
…[F]ollowing his successful Ein Deutsches Requiem, Brahms found some of [Friedrich] Hölderlin‘s poetry in a friend’s library and read “Hyperions Schicksalslied.” In walks along the beach near his friend’s home, Brahms began to sketch his Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny), opus 54. After struggling with the ending, he set the secular cantata aside, not to be finished until three years later. […] As with every work that survived Brahms’ fireplace, Schicksalslied is a masterpiece, portraying the brush between spiritually blinded, self-doomed mortals and the Elysian spirits. With woodwinds and strings, “[t]he introduction rises to a peak of longing, then sinks for the entrance of the altos declaiming . . . the unreachable bliss of the gods . . . . After the full choir enters, the verses unfold like a hymn. [T]he middle section plummets to earth, and human fate” then “sinks to an exhausted whisper . . . . [L]eaving the chorus tacet for the entire last section, [Brahms] reorchestrated the haunting first phrases . . . .” The cantata ends with instrumental music alone, “its ruthless beauty the only solace he knew now.” The ending adagio, which restates the C-minor prelude in an ethereal C major, consciously changes the meaning of the poem from resignation to resolution. Brahms couldn’t bring himself to do otherwise. (summary by Carol Talbeck)
More information is available on Wikipedia.