Brahms' Nänie, for four-voice choir and orchestra, was composed in 1880-81 and published in 1881. It received its first performance on December 6, 1881 in Zurich.

Setting a text by Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), Nänie was intended as a eulogy for Brahms' friend, the painter Anselm Feuerbach, who died in January 1880. The score is dedicated to Feuerbach's mother. Brahms completed Nänie in the summer of 1881, after a visit to Italy in the early spring.

On February 14, 1880 Brahms heard Hermann Goetz's setting of Schiller's Nänie in Vienna. The concert did more than give Brahms an idea for a text, for the two pieces bear significant similarities. For instance, both employ chorus and orchestra, both use a rising melody at the poem's central point, where the daughters of Nereus rise from the sea, both move to F sharp major for a middle section, and both shift between 4/4 and 6/4 meter.

Schiller's poem is a dirge for Adonis, beginning, "Auch das Schöne muss sterben" (Beauty must also die), a line undoubtedly associated by Brahms with the death of Feuerbach. Nänie is the last of Brahms' choral works to use a classical source.

Brahms divides Schiller's seven couplets into three sections, the first of which sets four couplets, the second two, the final couplet treated singly. The overall musical form of Nänie is ABA', with the outer sections in D major and 6/4 meter, the central in F sharp major and 4/4 meter. Brahms often chose 6/4 meter for his most profound statements, notably in his Ein deutsches Requiem, Op. 45. As in the Requiem, Brahms' writing for the chorus is generally polyphonic and occasionally even fugal.

Appropriately, the subdued introduction to Nänie, dominated by woodwinds, opens with a quote from Beethoven's "Les Adieux" Piano Sonata, Op. 81a, although the chord progression has been slightly altered. The plaintive oboe melody anticipates the chorus entrance. Brahms begins the text declamation with a fugue, although he abandons the traditional fugal process after all four voices enter, preferring to continue with developmental variation technique. The sweetness of the music increases at the mention of Adonis ("dem schönen Knaben"), when Brahms adds a harp to the ensemble and moves to F major. An increase in dynamic and a detached, accented accompaniment in the strings heralds the arrival of the warrior Achilles in the last couplet of the A section as the harmonic focus turns to the dominant, A major. The central section begins without fanfare, anticipated only harmonically. Shortly afterward appears one of the most poignant moments in the work, setting "Siehe, da weinen die Götter," (See, the gods are crying), where octave leaps that introduce suspensions convey the gods' anguish. When this line returns during the repetition of the couplet, Brahms adds the harp, much as he does for Adonis in section A. The structure is rounded by a compressed return of the woodwind introduction before the final couplet, which begins with the opening soprano line, although this time imitation occurs only in the basses, not all four voices.

Brahms' choice of major keys may indicate his perception of death as something not so tragic. Brahms' focus seems not to be the death of the protagonist, but the song itself, reflected in his choice, at the end, to repeat not the final line of Schiller's text, "Denn das Gemeine geht klanglos zum Orkus hinab" (the commoner goes silently to the underworld [death]), but the penultimate line, "Auch ein Klaglied zu sein im Mund der Geliebten ist herrlich" (A plaintive song, in the mouth of a loved one, is glorious).

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