Johannes Brahms’s tombstone in Vienna Central Cemetery. Wiener Zentralfriedhof

On May 24, Winsor Music presents a concert featuring artistic director Peggy Pearson’s arrangement of three of Johannes Brahms’s Eleven Chorale Preludes for organ (Op. 122), including the concluding prelude of that set, on the chorale “O Welt, ich muss dich lassen” — the last piece Brahms ever finished. Whether intended as a final testament or not (and it would have been characteristically wry for Brahms to make his valediction a set of preludes), Brahms wrote the work and its immediate predecessor, the Four Serious Songs (Op. 121), under the shadows of his own illness and the May 1896 death of his longtime friend, the pianist and composer Clara Schumann. Both works are, essentially, meditations on death.

“O Welt, ich muss dich lassen” (“O world, I must leave you”) is one of the most famous Lutheran funeral chorales. It began as a rather more wistful song about leaving the city of Innsbruck, the tune composed (or, at least, arranged) by the great Netherlandish master Heinrich Isaac. Sometime in the 1500s, an anonymous lyricist turned the farewell to the city into a farewell to life itself: “To die is my gain; there is no remaining on the earth.” (Brahms knew well the song’s genesis; his own hand-copied score of Isaac’s original was still in his library at his death.)