Come to St. Stephen’s Cathedral to hear Johannes Brahms’s famous German Requiem, a majestic work intended not as funeral music, but as a source of comfort for those “who are in sorrow.”

Although the title of the work might suggest otherwise, the German Requiem is not, strictly speaking, funeral music. The central theme of the work is not the eternal rest of the dead, but rather the consolation of those left behind. It is music intended primarily for the living, and through its choice of texts, it reflects the composer’s intentions and personal grief, as he had recently lost his mother.

“Since Bach’s Mass in B minor and Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, nothing has been written that can stand alongside Brahms’s German Requiem in this genre,” wrote the notoriously hard-to-please music critic Eduard Hanslick in his glowing assessment of this work, which not only marked Brahms’s breakthrough but would also go on to become the most popular of his compositions.

Join the Vienna Cathedral Choir and the Vienna Cathedral Orchestra, conducted by Cathedral Music Director Markus Landerer, along with renowned soloists, and experience the magic of this masterpiece for yourself at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna.