"Songs of Faith" for Mixed Choir and Orchestra, Op. 54

Brahms began working on the Song of Destiny in the summer of 1868, when, during a visit to his friend, the composer Albert Dietrich, in Wilhelmshaven, he found in his library the poetic text of Friedrich Hölderlin's Song of the Destiny of Hyperion from his unfinished novella Hyperion. But it was not until May 1871 that Brahms finally completed his work, for he had been searching for a suitable version of its finale for a long time. (Meanwhile, in 1869, the Rhapsody for contralto, male chorus and orchestra, based on Goethe's poems, was created.) Song of Destiny is constructed in a three-movement form, with the first two movements based on Hölderlin's couplets ("Upward thou risest in the light..." and "But it is given to us..."), and the final movement a kind of return to the beginning of the first, but in purely instrumental terms, with the orchestral prelude expanded and enriched into a symphonized postlude. The composer was somewhat led to the idea of this solution for the finale by Hermann Levi, who conducted the premiere performance on October 18^th, 1871 in Karlsruhe. After the German Requiem, the Song of Destiny is Brahms's most imposing and popular choral opus. In his monograph on the composer, Joseph Sittard wrote: "Even if Brahms had composed nothing but this work, it would have been enough to place him alongside the greatest masters."