Legacy

At a Chinese funeral that I attended recently, there was a lot of debate about whether the Christians amongst the family should be participating in the prayers and ceremonies, which followed the Taoist and Buddhist traditions.

I won’t offer an opinion on the matter, but reflect on this: when Brahms wrote Ein deutsches Requiem (Op. 45, A German Requiem) in the 1860s, he derived the text from the Lutheran Bible. However he managed to write the libretto in such a way that it could have read as a Jewish prayer. In fact, it may even serve as a respectful and sincere requiem for a believer of any of the Abrahamic religions – more than half of the world’s population. There is an elegance in both the music and the text that suggests that the ecumenism of the message could only have been intended by Brahms. What a wonderful legacy.