Song of Destiny, Op. 54

Imagine standing at the edge of the sea watching a storm roll in from perfect stillness: that is the emotional arc of this barely 16-minute work for chorus and orchestra, and once you hear it you will not stop thinking about it. Brahms discovered Friedrich Hölderlin's poem contrasting the serene, timeless existence of the gods with the turbulent, blindly cast fate of humanity, and spent years wrestling with how to end it, the delay so productive it gave us the Alto Rhapsody as a side effect. The opening is luminous and hovering, the chorus entering with a long, arching melody over a bed of strings; then without warning everything fractures into a restless, churning second section before Brahms makes a quietly radical decision: he refuses to return the voices at the close, letting only the orchestra replay the opening music, now in a different key, as if the gods are still serene and human anguish simply falls away beneath them.

What to listen for

Pay close attention to the moment the turbulent choral storm finally exhausts itself and the orchestra alone takes back the opening theme, now in a bright major key rather than the original one: the effect is of light breaking through after a gale, at once comforting and slightly unresolved, because the choir is silent. That hovering, wordless orchestral coda is one of the strangest and most beautiful endings in all of Brahms, and many listeners find it leaves them suspended between consolation and longing.

Recommended recording

John Eliot Gardiner with the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (Soli Deo Gloria, 2008) has been praised for transparent period-instrument textures that keep the music buoyant and the choral lines unusually clear.

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