MSO: Britten’s War Requiem

  

In 1963 the now famous composer John Rutter, who was later to himself pen a renowned Requiem, was a young chorister in the Highgate School choir in North London, and participated in the recording of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem which had premiered the year before. He wrote looking back at the experience that "I think we knew that we were touching the hem of history’s garment". From its inception the War Requiem has been acknowledged as one of Britten’s masterworks and one of the most important choral works of the 20th century.

Britten is known to have been displeased and frustrated with the technical constraints of staging the premier performance of the commission made to mark and celebrate the reconsecration of Coventary Cathedral which had been destroyed by German bombers in WWII in 1940. Despite his misgivings the premier was a triumph of unequalled measure. At the time critics found the work so profoundly moving that it was suggested to be ”impertinent” to fault it, and the recording the following year sold over 200,000 copies, a phenomenon without precedent for a contemporary work and not repeated until Gorecki’s 3rd Symphony Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (Symfonia pieśni żałosnych, 1976/7) was to sell over 2 million copies.

What made Britten’s work so moving and powerful in 1962 and why is the work still increasingly popular?

Importantly, notwithstanding the Coventary commission, Britten , an agnostic who admired the teaching of Jesus, a life-long pacifist and a conscientious objector, had written a non-liturgical setting of the Requiem, the traditional Mass for the Dead. This separation of the work from use in a formal church service allowed him to intersperse key sections of the traditional Requiem- Aeternam, Dies Irae, Offertorium, Sanctus, Agnus Dei and Libera me - with poems by Wilfred Owen.

Britten divided the considerable musical forces needed to perform the work, (up to 200 artists), into three groups. There is no call-and-response antiphony, but rather the groups alternate and interact, only singing together in the last movement. Britten scored the work for soprano and choir with full orchestra, baritone and tenor with chamber orchestra. A boys choir accompanied by a small organ was physically removed to an antechamber, as if they were souls of the dead calling from heaven. The soprano and full choir and boys choir sing the Latin text from the Requiem while the male soloists sing Owen’s poems.

Britten moved in lofty literary circles and was a close friend with WH Auden so the choice of Owen’s poems is particularly significant. Owen was almost unknown at the time of his death in the last week of WW1 in 1918, but his stature as one of the most important War Poets in the English language remains unassailed by late 20th century revisionism and was well established by the 1960’s.

That is perhaps because his work is so utterly honest.

Owen wrote of his work:

"I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense conciliatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful."

Owen expresses here two emotions that I felt intensely when I experienced the MSO’s truly outstanding performance last week.

The first is the sense of poetic elegy. It is as if Britten felt that there was something unfinished still in the 1960s, a deep need to recognise and honour the countless dead. Poignantly and very powerfully during the Requiem, Owen’s poetry recasts the biblical story of Abraham - where Abraham instead of sparing, kills his son Isaac “and half the seed of Europe”- conveying a profound sense of betrayal and hopeless abandonment and the scale of utter carnage that occurred in both World Wars.

The second is the foreboding emotion that accompanies bearing honest witness of atrocity. A melancholy dread and a sense of dire warning conveyed from beyond the grave. It is quite unlike the patriotism explicit in Sir Edward Elgar’s The Spirit of England (1915-17, a setting of three war poems by Laurence Binyon) and much closer to the tragic, bitterly critical irony Owen expressed in his 1917 poem (The old lie) Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country) recounting the horror of a mustard gas attack.

It is hard for us to recover how deeply troubled the world was in the early 1960s - which popular culture now falsely remembers with swinging London love-in’s, the Beatles and Hippy’s in Hyde Park. Europe was still not fully recovered emotionally or economically from the devastation of WWII. The USSR had annexed Hungary in 1956.

Britain was embroiled with the USA in the cold war against the USSR and communism that would rage on - through Byzantine Proxy wars and the Space-Race for decades, threatening nuclear mass destruction.

NATO forces largely occupied a Germany divided by the Iron Curtain as military strategists developed short range “tactical” nuclear bombs. The Cuban Missile crisis and student up-rising were only a few years away. The UN doomsday clock, measuring how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction, was at one minute to midnight and everyone knew it.

It is also hard for us to recover that art at that time still offered a voice of critical resistance. Krzysztof Penderecki had composed his immensely influential Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima in 1960 (a Threnody is a formal song of Lament). And the protest song movement was already gathering force on both sides of the Atlantic. Stravinski’s Requiem Canticles are from the same period.

Britten was very much aware of the geo-politics and set himself and the work aside. He had conceived the work which had long been on his mind with his partner, tenor Peter Pears in mind and during the composition approached German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. The soprano role was added in discussion with lifelong friend Mstislav Rostropovich for his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya (who withdrew days before the premier after coercive pressure was placed on her by the USSR Ministry for Culture, to be replaced by Heather Harper. Vishnevskaya recorded the work in 1963). This political interference is like a fossil exactly preserving the atmosphere of the time.

And so what of the current performance?

By any measure a triumph. The War Requiem requires coordination of very large musical forces physically separated. The scale and range of the work, its alternation between full and chamber orchestra, between liturgical Latin and recitative poetry is immensely challenging. Under the baton of Tadaaki Otaka the MSO and MSO chorus were luminous.

The National Boys Choir sung with penetrating clarity and the soloists, Elena Zelenskaya, (soprano), Timothy Robinson, (tenor), Stephan Loges, (baritone) delivered accomplished and moving performances.

When the War Requiem was first performed, its music must have seemed like salt rubbed in still-raw wounds. As WWII passes slowly from living memory, the perfection achieved in tonight’s performance reminds us again of the power of art as memory and how culture binds us together in shared experience, allowing an understanding , through the evocation of entrained empathies, of the deep sorrows of the past.

Therein lies the power of music.

Benjamin Britten
Requiem
MSO and MSO Chorus,
The National Boys' Choir
Elena Zelenskaya, soprano,
Timothy Robinson, tenor
Stephan Loges, baritone
Tadaaki Otaka,conductor.