A German Requiem (Brahms) the traditional Roman Catholic Requiem Mass, which employs a standardized text in Latin, the text is derived from the German Luther Bible. Brahms's first known use of the title "Ein deutsches Requiem" was in an 1865 letter to Clara Schumann in which he wrote that he intended the piece to be ""eine Art deutsches Requiem"" (a sort of German Requiem). Brahms was quite moved when he found out years later that Robert Schumann had planned a work of the same name. "German" refers primarily to the language rather than the intended audience. Brahms told Carl Martin Reinthaler, director of music
French classical music the twentieth-century, composers took many different paths. Some composers looked backwards to the light, elegant Classical works, with the Neoclassicism of the Russian-French composer Stravinsky. Austro-German composers such as Schoenberg and Berg and used a tortured, dramatic style called Expressionism. The French composer Boulez abandoned the entire tonal (key-centered) tradition of Western music with a style called Serialism. Other composers explored electronic music (Stockhausen); chance-based or random (aleatoric) music and indeterminacy (Cage); and minimalism (Reich, Glass). French classical music French classical music began with the sacred music of the Roman Catholic Church, with written records predating the reign of Charlemagne.