 And welcome to the First Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical, and social issues in an accepting and nurturing environment. Unitarian Universalism supports the freedom of conscience of each individual, as together we strive to be a force for good in the world. My name is Michael Schuller. I serve as the senior minister of the society. On behalf of our congregation, I'd like to extend a warm welcome to each and all, and especially to any visitors among us today. We are in fact a welcoming congregation. So whoever you are and wherever you are on your life's journey, we celebrate your presence among us. If you are accompanied by a young child, and I don't see very many of them here, please remember that if they need to talk or to move around, the commons outside or the child haven to my left and to the rear are good places to retire with them because you can see and you can hear the performance from those locations. At this time, please silence any electronic devices that you might have brought with you that would compromise our enjoyment of today's program. Please note the announcements that are in the red floors insert of your order of service, which describes some upcoming events as well as the services that will be held here next weekend, Easter Sunday weekend. A few words now about our composer, Johannes Brahms, and the work that we are showcasing this afternoon. Brahms was born in 1833, almost a century after the death of Johann Sebastian Bach, a fellow German and a composer whom he deeply admired. When a new Handel edition comes out, he once confided to a friend, I put it in the library and I say to myself, as soon as I have time, I will look it over. But when I knew Bach edition appears, I let everything else go. Although kindred spirits musically, Bach and Brahms didn't have a great deal in common. Bach had two wives. He sired 20 children. Brahms had dear women friends, but he never married, and he was very fond of children, but he never had any of his own. Bach belonged to a long family lineage of consummate musicians. Brahms' father was a double-based player of middling abilities who just happened to produce a son with perfect pitch and natural talent. Bach was a pious Lutheran who penned Help Jesus at the top of every score he produced. Brahms was a nominal Lutheran, but also a free thinker of whom his friend Dvorak once wrote, such a great man, such a great soul, and he believes in nothing. Probably an overstatement. From a musical standpoint, Brahms could be described perhaps as something of a conservative, at least by comparison with composers like Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt. Although he experimented in many different musical genres, Brahms, for instance, never wrote an opera. And while compositions like the Requiem can be big and lush and dignified, Brahms was said to avoid theatricality. Brahms is a composer, as one commentator put it, who cannot exalt. We'll see if you agree after today's performance. Unlike Bach, Brahms was a celebrated figure, and he acquired both fame and wealth during his lifetime. Nevertheless, he maintained a conservative lifestyle, living in modest quarters, eating from cheap restaurants, wearing suits with patches on the sleeves. He styled himself a man of the people and was generous with the working-class folk who served him. Brahms loved to hike, he reveled in nature, enjoyed robust health until he was stricken with and died from liver cancer at the age of 64. The German Requiem is the longest work that Brahms ever wrote. He was 34 when it was first performed. It may have been inspired initially by the death of the composer's mother in 1865, but the second movement you will hear perhaps began a decade before that, when Brahms joined Clara Schumann in mourning the decline of her husband Robert Schumann, Brahms' dear friend. Schumann, as you may know, ended up committed to an asylum. This setting that you'll hear today does not conform to what is typically found in a Latin Requiem Mass, and because Brahms drew his material from Martin Luther's Bible, the Requiem was first sung in the vernacular German rather than in the Latin. Its texts are all drawn from the Bible, both the Old and the New Testaments, and yet there is no mention of Christ or his redemptive work on behalf of sinful humanity, which was another deviation from the tradition of Requiem. Frustrated with this important omission, Carl Martin Reinhaller, the music director at the Bremen Cathedral, where the piece was first performed in its entirety, Reinhaller added to the Requiem a solo drawn from Handel's Messiah in which the soprano was saying, I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that is not something that we'll be adding today. Our performers are presenting the London version of the Brahms Requiem based on the first performance in that city. It will be sung in English with forehand piano rather than orchestral accompaniment. This version also contains a fifth movement that was added later and was not part of the London debut. Enjoy. If you enjoyed this afternoon's performance, if you were inspired by this beautiful piece by Brahms, there are receptacles outside of each one of the exit doors, and we would welcome any contributions to our society's music fund. Please be generous. Let us sing the magic of imagination by which we know one another and learn the lives of ages gone by. Let us sing the magic of creation by which we build the world of our soul and teach it its wisdom to others, both young and old. Let us sing the magic of our lives together, holding and shaping by the movement of our breath all new life that is to come. Go now with singing. Go now with magic in your fingertips. Touch this world with the gift of your loving lives. Blessed be and amen.