A German Requiem (Brahms) humanism persists through the work. Brahms purposely omitted Christian dogma. In his correspondence with Carl Reinthaler, when Reinthaler expressed concern over this, Brahms refused to add references to "the redeeming death of the Lord", as Reinthaler described it, such as . In the Bremen performance of the piece, Reinthaler took the liberty of inserting the aria "I know that my Redeemer liveth" from Handel's "Messiah" to satisfy the clergy. In addition to soprano and baritone soloists and mixed chorus, "A German Requiem" is scored for: Since Brahms inserted the fifth movement, the work shows symmetry around the fourth movement, which
Don Robertson (composer) Don Robertson (composer) Don Robertson (born 1942) is an American composer. Don Robertson was born in 1942 in Denver, Colorado, and began studying music with conductor and pianist Antonia Brico at age 3. He attended Colorado University, the Juilliard School of Music, and the Institute of Ethnomusicology at UCLA, and has studied composition privately with composer Morton Feldman, counterpoint with Leonard Stein, tabla with Swapan Chaudhuri and Shankar Ghosh, and ragas with David Trasoff. As one of the first wave of U.S. students of North Indian classical music, he wrote the first instruction book for tabla, published by Peer-Southern International