Karl Richter conducts Brahms's A German Requiem — With Evelyn Lear and Thomas Stewart

Between 1963 and 1971, the program Prestige de la musique celebrated classical music on French television and the greatest performers took to the stage of the Salle Pleyel alongside the ORTF Orchestra—now renamed the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra. This archive from 1966 highlights one of the most memorable choral works in the history of music: Brahms’s A German Requiem. Karl Richter conducts the Philharmonic Orchestra and Choirs of the ORTF with Evelyn Lear and Thomas Stewart taking on the solo parts.

Deeply affected by the death of his mentor and friend Robert Schumann in 1856, then by the loss of his mother in 1865, Brahms undertook the composition of a choral work that would help him through his grief. A German Requiem breaks free from traditional liturgical conventions: far from being a funeral mass in the strict sense, it takes a resolutely spiritual approach and draws its texts from the German Bible rather than the customary Latin liturgy. Structured in seven movements of great expressive intensity, the Requiem traces an inner journey of the soul—from pain to compassion to hope. In doing so, the composer fulfilled a prophecy voiced by Schumann himself a decade earlier: “When he touches the choir and orchestra with his magic wand, ready to bring him all their power, wonderful glimpses of the secrets of the spiritual world will be revealed to us.”