''The Berlin Requiem'' (German: ) is a 1928 composition for tenor, baritone, and choir of three male voices and orchestra by

Kurt Weill Kurt Julian Weill (March 2, 1900April 3, 1950) was a German-born American composer active from the 1920s in his native country, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fru ...

to poems by

Bertolt Brecht Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a pl ...

. The work had been commissioned by the who intended to broadcast the work on all its stations. However Brecht failed to abide by his contractual obligation to show the poems to the commissioning body for advance approval and the content, some of it a memorial to

Rosa Luxemburg Rosa Luxemburg (; ; pl, Róża Luksemburg or ; 5 March 1871 – 15 January 1919) was a Polish and naturalised-German revolutionary socialist, Marxist philosopher and anti-war activist. Successively, she was a member of the Proletariat party, ...

, led to several stations banning the performance.Peter Jelavich ''Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture'' 2006 0520931645 p.119 "Indeed, despite his frequent public calls for freedom of expression, Heilmann once before had been a crucial swing voter regarding a controversial cultural work: the Berlin Requiem, a set of morbid poems by Bertolt Brecht set to music by Kurt Weil..." Weill took a commission from Radio Frankfurt, producing the ''Berlin Requiem'' based on some of Brecht's poems. A specific theme of the chosen texts is the forgotten dead, "faceless war casualties, or victims of violent crime whose bodies are disposed of in an undetected location", according to one writer. Some of the musical portion is quite spartan, with, for example, much of "" accompanied solely by guitar.

Movements

# (Great Chorale of Thanksgiving) # (Ballad of the Drowned Girl) # (memorial tablet) # (alternate to 3) (Gravestone 1919) # (First Report on the Unknown Soldier) # (Second Report on the Unknown Soldier) # (To Potsdam under the Oak Trees) ''Source: AllMusic''

References

Works by Bertolt Brecht Compositions by Kurt Weill 1928 poems 1928 compositions Requiems {{Composition-stub