Johannes Brahms's Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem) is one of those rare works equally respected by scholars and beloved by performers and audiences, and it continues to be one of the most often performed choral works from the nineteenth century. It engages listeners through its broad range of expressive styles—from somber and tragic, tender and lyrical, to triumphant and sublime—and speaks to them through its spiritual emphasis on the inescapable human experience of grief, with both its acknowledgment of sorrow and its provision for hope. For singers, its choral writing is challenging yet gratifying, and its moderate length in comparison to the typically protracted choral pieces from the same century makes it more sensible for organizations to program and more reasonable for audiences to absorb. For Brahms scholars, it is the composer's most substantial work, which solidified Brahms's reputation and serves as an excellent example of his masterful assimilation and continuation of the German music tradition.

One might expect that such a widely admired and richly textured work would be the subject of an extensive array of scholarly interpretations, particularly with the seemingly endless supply of approaches to musical and literary analysis currently available. However, modern appraisals of the Requiem offer a consistent, almost monolithic, judgment. Recent evaluations of the Requiem are virtually unanimous in their opinion that, even though it sets only biblical passages, the work was vigilantly crafted by its composer to avoid specific references to Christianity and therefore speaks to all humanity through texts universal in their application. For example, Michael Musgrave, a leading Brahms scholar and an expert on the Requiem, claims it “has become one of the most universal expressions of religious sentiment” and that “the work was essentially humanist in conception.” Curiously, most recent writers deny a Christian reading of the work, and yet none have provided a robust alternative interpretation in its place. They fervently preach what it is not about but fail to clarify what, in their estimation, it actually communicates.