The content of the symphony concert program during Holy Week revolves around faith and religion, redemption, nature, love and death. In Olivier Messiaen's symphonic meditation Les Offrandes oubliées (The Forgotten Offerings) from 1931, music becomes the carrier of metaphysical thoughts and feelings. The pain of forgetting the sufferings of Christ gives way to calm transfiguration at the end. Richard Wagner has his last stage work Parsifal(1882) expressly described it as a »Bühnenweihfestspiel«, thereby clearly distinguishing it from his other music dramas. It takes us into the world of a community of knights who guard the Holy Grail, the bowl in which the blood of the Savior was caught and the spear with which he was wounded. When Parsifal brings back the spear that had been lost to the magician Klingsor in the third act of the work, it is Good Friday, »the day of greatest pain«. But nature does not mourn, but blossoms in the most beautiful way - Good Friday magic. In the last symphony by Johannes Brahms, the great antipode of Richard Wagner, religious references are not overt. Striking are their strongly archaic traits, which are e.g in the use of modal (ecclesiastical) turns and old form models as well as in echoes of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The passacaglia theme of the finale, for example, goes back to the final chorus of a Bach church cantata, the text of which says: "My days in suffering end nevertheless in God's joy".
