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Inkvault Archives

Articles from Sequence II:

BRITTEN War Requiem

BRAHMS German Requiem

CORIGLIANO Of Rage and Remembrance: Symphony No.1

ELIAS The Prayer Cycle

"Images of Christ"

MAHLER Symphony No.9

MARTINÙ Memorial to Lidice. NONO Canti di vita e d'amore. SCHÖNBERG A Survivor from Warsaw. HARTMANN Symphony No.1 "Versuch eines Requiem"

SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No.13 "Babi Yar"

More Requiem Articles

by Chia Han-Leon
with Ng Yeuk Fan

In key excruciating moments of immense depression, suffering, outrage, betrayal, heartbreak, the human spirit suffers massive destruction. There is simply no way to fully convey this with any word: "War" comes close. Yet, it is in suffering that the enduring survive to create, because of that singular sweep of destruction. History records the unbelievable acts of war humans have raged and ravaged over each other for thousands of years; memory checks those who were there, who survived. But time, unceasing time, does not translate feeling across memory very well. In time, we, legacy of the survivors, all forget what exactly "war" means. Do we even understand what "requiem" means?

The surviving create, restore, but also record for history. Some do not write records, instead they transmit their experience of terror through perhaps, humanity's only true act of Creation, other than birth: Art. The War Poets wrote their poems - one wonders what scrap of paper they might have written with what half-blunt pencil while they trudged through their luridly insane battlefields. Certainly, their outrage, their irony and their poetry will constitute a different sort of history; one, which perhaps, may convey more than dates and death tolls.

But the story here is of another form of remembrance - that through music. History books no longer terrify us, nor does cable TV news; images, bullet rocketing through bloodied brain - shudder our nerves, then deaden them. We watch every day the daily diet of death and destruction. Poetry, quiet words on the page, intone their nightmares silently, unless... someone begins to sing them. But too often we reduce poetry to voiceless ink. Thus there is music, sounds which exist only in time. Sounds which can only be deliberately played, whose dissonances twist and sting, moving words from the page.

Today, displaced in time from the wars, we can only listen, just as Wilfred Owen would say "All a poet can do today is warn." But his today is not our today; it is already unmoving history. Today, here, the subject, to specify, is Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, a work of warning, just as this essay will warn that its music is not immediately harmonious to the ear, if at all. But that is exactly it, music of war and warning which must hammer and sting us now.

Britten (left) was of the opinion that art must be useful. It was not sufficient to him for music to pursue purely aesthetic objectives. Although innate aesthetics must never be abandoned, they should be a means to an end: and here in the War Requiem, he exemplifies this ideal effectively: portraying the futility and pity of war.

In portraying war, Britten uses his own voice - the true mark of a genius. There are moments of real tension - not all of which becomes resolved. We are told that these musical tensions are derived from his personal doubts as a pacifist about religious organisations that do not condemn outright war and military action. The War Requiem does not represent Britten's first exploration of this motif - there being earlier attempts in his operas Billy Budd (1951) and Peter Grimes (1945), and further in his cantata Rejoice in the Lamb. However, the War Requiem, written for the consecration of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral (destroyed in 1941 during the war), taps his tendencies to greater and deeper effect. This requiem is not simply a public commemoration of the victims of war, but an expression of the personal belief that war, while repulsive, can give rise to a level of emotion quite different from those propagated through oft-repeated rituals of religious observance.

Britten was aware that his operatic anti-war statements did not achieve what his War Requiem could - on the account that for an artist to warn effectively, his message had to be embodied in form as much if not more than in content. Further, the sense of unease resulting from the achievement of a precarious balance within an essentially unstable structure would be a more potent metaphor for the act of warning than an explicit denunciation of violence. Britten thus did not intend a covert attack on the established church on its condoning of violence, but rather, expresses the irony between the feelings of those asked to lay down their lives and those who choose to mourn them by way of a religious celebration.

Below: The composer, who conducted the Melos Ensemble (not visible), speaking to Meredith Davies (on platform), who conducted the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Coventry Festival Chorus, at rehearsals for the premiere at the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral. (Photo by Erich Auerbach)

The result of this use of devices to portray instability - the use of his 'bell' interval, the tritone (heard in the orchestra and chorus at the beginning) - is one of great effectiveness. An aural picture interweaving stable and unstable passages is achieved by the pervasive use of the tritone as an unstable element, as it were, a dissonance capable of great cathartic resolution into consonance but equally capable of preserving its instability.

The War Requiem is thus succinctly described in the notes to Britten's 1963 recording by the celebrated Christopher Palmer: "There are three distinct levels or planes within the War Requiem. In the foreground are two soldiers, one English, one German (the parts were written for Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau respectively), who sing with the chamber ochestra, ever a medium for Britten for private combination. Beyond them range the celebrants of the Mass itself: soprano soloist (Galina Vishnevskaya, a Russian), full chorus and full symphony orchestra. They represent the formal, ritualized expression of mourning, and a liturgical pleas for deliverance on the part of humanity-in-the-mass. At a still further remove is a chorus of boys' voices and organ suspended in limbo: innocent and pure-sounding but totally divorced from breathing human passion... . They represent a zenith (or nadir) of remoteness."

Throughout, the "modern" tone of the work is unrelenting, and yet somehow, most of all in Britten's own recording, it is highly effective. Not all the music is mournful, much of it is reflective, and some moments even celebrate. From the beginning, the "Requiem" movement is wrought in ominous atmosphere, choir with pained strings, bell tolling, brass crying, looming tam-tam. Britten's dissonances are not just for show, they make their point.

A chaotic, mocking setting of Wilfred Owen's "What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?" (the title speaks for itself) interrupts the "liturgical" choral music. As this movement for solo tenor with chamber ensemble peters out, like a dark jest, the chorus returns with a quiet "Kyrie".

The songs for the two soldiers range from the solemn " " for the baritone, to the parodic "Out there", where the soldiers share a meal with Death, reveling in entertainment - the irony of the lines are pure Owen: "We've sniffed the green thick odour of [Death's] breath" - a reference to gas; "We whistled while [Death] shaved us with his scythe."

Witness Britten's solemn-heroic setting of:

Be slowly lifted up, thou long black arm,
Great gun towering toward Heaven, about to curse;

Reach at that arrogance which needs thy harm,

And beat it down before its sins grow worse;
but when thy spell be cast complete and whole;
May God curse thee, and cut thee from our soul!