The Berlin Requiem (German: Das Berliner Requiem) is a 1928 cantata for tenor, baritone, and choir of three male voices and orchestra by Kurt Weill to poems by Bertolt Brecht.
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, led to several stations banning the performance.
[2] 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.
[3] Some of the musical portion is quite spartan, with, for example, much of "Ballade vom ertrunkenen Mädchen" accompanied solely by guitar.