Benjamin Britten: The War Requiem

In the preface to the book he intended to publish his collected poems, but did not live to see, Wilfred Owen stated:

”This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all, I am not concerned about 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 consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.”

If Britten’s War Requiem is about anything, it is about the tragedy and futility of war, millions of young lives needlessly lost. The Requiem expresses the Pity of War in musical form.

This is perhaps why Britten chose to place at the centre of the War Requiem, nine poems by Wilfred Owen, written mainly during the last two years of his life, when he was encountering the brutality and slaughter of soldiers of all nations on the Western Front.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)*

Owen was born in 1893 in the late Victorian era, and grew up near Oswestry in rural Shropshire. He discovered his passion for poetry very early on, when he was eight or nine years old; his main influences were the English romantic poets of the early nineteenth century especially Shelley and Keats.

The dominant influence in his life was his mother, with whom he had an extremely close but fraught relationship. Susan Owen was a fervent, puritanical, evangelical Christian. She spotted his latent poetic talent early on and expected great things of him. Her exclusive possessiveness caused a rift in the family. His increasingly artistic and poetic aspirations led to a distancing from his down-to-earth station-master father.

Much to his disappointment, he did not qualify either to Oxford or Cambridge, which led to him feeling disenfranchised, that he had been denied the further education he had desperately needed as a poet. Instead, in 1911, he chose to persue what he felt at that time to be his vocation within the Anglican Church; he decided, since he could not go to university, to work as an unpaid clerical assistant in the high Anglican parish of Dunsden near Reading.

However, the stuffy, inflexible atmosphere led to a rapid cooling of his affinity with Christianity. After six months he left and moved to France, to teach English in Bordeaux. Whilst in France he had several homosexual affairs. Since poetry was the means through which he expressed all his experience, there are references to this in some of his poems (see Shadwell Stair, To Eros, or Storm for example).

It is noticeable that his homosexual identity has been suppressed, almost through a process of collective amnesia. The most recent and otherwise comprehensive biography of Owen makes no reference to Owen’s sexual identity (Cuthbertson, 2014). His collected letters edited by his brother Harold (Journey from Obscurity (1963) deletes or redacts any reference to his sexual orientation. His mother destroyed all his letters to the soldier and war poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was known to be gay.

Owen stayed in France when the war started, and resisted joining up in the first wave of ‘your country needs you’ frenetic patriotism of 1914. He had a disinclination to join a war in which he could see the imperialist ambitions of all the great European powers being played out, at the vast human cost of the lives of millions of their young men (see ‘The Send Off’, 1918).

His ambivalence is expressed in a letter to his mother in 1915, when he wrote: “The Daily Mail speaks very movingly of the ‘duties shirked’ by English young men, but I shall go on playing with my little axiom – that my life is worth more than my death to Englishmen.” He was however never, in the language of the time, a ‘shirker’. He gave short shrift to passivists or ‘conchies’ as they were called. He finally decided to enlist in October 1915, and joined the Artist’s rifles, writing to his mother: “I do now intensely want to fight.”

After a year of training and preparation, he finally saw active service in January 1917. In April that year he was caught in the blast of a German howitzer trench mortar shell, suffering concussion. These shells created a huge impact, often thirty feet wide and twenty feet deep, obliterating the men in the centre of the blast.

When he awoke, he found he was lying in a shell crater in no-mans-land, on top of the remains of one of his fellow officers. He was stuck there for several days before being rescued. Soon after he was diagnosed as suffering from neurasthenia, or shell-shock, and was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. Whilst there, his doctor encouraged him to convert the nightmares he was constantly experiencing into poetry.

A fellow patient there was the soldier and poet Siegfried Sassoon, who enthusiastically encouraged him in the further development of his mature poetic style. After his recovery, despite the opposition of just about everyone he knew, including Sassoon, he decided to re-join active service in France in July 1918. During the course of the war, Owen had become a soldier of great conviction and courage.

As his poems and letters make clear, he felt caught in an impossible dilemma; he was experiencing a deepening revulsion to the barbarity of the slaughter of young lives, but he discovered in himself a deep desire to return to the front and protect the lives as best he could of the men under his command. This inevitably led him to the insurmountable moral dilemma of killing or being killed.

Once at the front, on the Somme, he served as the platoon commander of a rifle company of the Second Manchester regiment. On October 1st he led his company in storming a number of German units near the village of Joncourt, where he took control of a captured machine gun, in an isolated position, and inflicted heavy losses using it. He was awarded a Military Cross for his bravery in this action.

He was killed a few weeks later on 4th November 1918, during the crossing of the Sambre-Oise canal. He had last been seen attempting to cross the canal on a raft with some of his men, carrying planks to help build a pontoon across the canal, facing withering enemy fire. This was just one week before the Armistice of November 11th 1918. This was the last significant battle of the war; the German defeat in this action contributed to the German High Command’s decision to surrender on 11th November.

* see Hibberd D (2003) Wilfred Owen

Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, in November 1913. Beneath the surface of what might have appeared a successful middle-class marriage, there were substantial tensions. His father had been born illegitimate, then a considerable stigma, and was stern and remote; his talented and musical mother was an alcoholic.

His experience of the sadistic, punitive, physically abusive approach of his preparatory school at South Lodge Lowestoft contributed to his life-long hatred of physical violence and his dedication to Passivism.

His musical education received a major boost when his talent brought him to the attention of Frank Bridge, then a major English composer, also a convinced passivist, who became an influential mentor for Britten.

His musical career began to take off when he joined the GPO film unit in 1935, where he composed dozens of film scores. Over this period of time, he was grappling with and learning to accept his homosexuality. He was encouraged in this by W H Auden, who for a while was a close friend, and had ‘come out’ about his own homosexuality.

In 1937, he met Peter Pears, with whom he formed a life-long musical and personal partnership. Pears was the leading English Tenor of his generation. In April 1939, Britten and Pears declared themselves passivists, and wanting to have in nothing to do with the impending war, they sailed in America. In 1942, in part due to homesickness, but also wanting to make their own contribution to the peace effort, they returned to the UK.

Attitude towards Passivism: Owen and Britten

Both men had deep beliefs and sentiments about the evilness and destructiveness of war, but expressed them in entirely different ways. Owen’s traumatic experiences of war drove him towards an increasingly negative and cynical attitude, whilst also being an active serving officer. In one of his letters to his mother from the frontline, he wrote that he viewed war as a “Crime against nature, a crime against humanity’s potential for good, a crime against creation itself” (also see Futility,1918) He was however, no passivist, and might well have been very surprised to see his poems play such a central part in the deeply anti-war Passivist convictions that lie at the heart of the War Requiem.

During the war his poetry underwent a huge transformation from its romantic origins in Shelley and Keats, triggered mainly by his exposure to the horrors of the Western Front. His poems are terrifyingly direct in conveying the carnage, horror, waste and devastation of war. As the war carried on, he felt increasing embittered both by his own senior commanders, and the stance of the church. As the ‘national’ church, it supported and endorsed the war effort of the British armed forces, at the cost of contradicting the fundamental beliefs of the Christian faith itself, to love one another as oneself (see Calvary at Ancre, 1918).

By this time, much of his poetry was expressing a paradoxical unity and brotherhood amongst all soldiers, on both sides of the conflict, whether English, French or German. Increasingly he saw all soldiers of whatever nationality as heroic sacrificial Christ-like victims, equally caught up in the meat-grinder of war (see The Parable of the Old Man and the Young, Strange Meeting, 1918).

Unlike Owen, Britten did not feel the need to actively join in the war effort. Consequently, in the 1930’s he did not join in the Spanish Civil War, which had become a popular passivist cause in defending the country against the assaults of the dictator General Franco. On the other hand, he did express his opposition to war musically throughout his career.

In the mid 1930’s he wrote the music for a five-minute film called the Peace of Britain. He also composed a pacifist march for the Peace Pledge Union, of which he was a prominent member. The shadow of the impact of Nazi Germany can be felt in works such as Our Hunting Fathers (1936). Ballad of Heroes (1939) commemorates the fallen members of the International Brigade in Spain. Sinfonia da Requiem (1940) is a passionate plea for peace in the midst of the second world war.

After their return from America in 1942, both Britten and Pears, as very public conscientious objectors, tried to make their own contribution. They gave for example numerous concerts under the auspices of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts. In 1945, he played concerts with Yehudi Menuhin in the liberated concentration camps including Belsen.

The cause of peace and the liberation from the ravages of war had long been a central theme of his life and career as a composer. He had been looking for an opportunity to compose a significant, large-scale choral work that could take its place amongst the monuments of English choral tradition.

In 1958 this opportunity arrived. He received a commission to celebrate the inauguration of a new Cathedral in Coventry, to replace the 14th century St Michael’s Cathedral which had been almost completely destroyed during the night of 14th November 1940, in a Luftwaffe raid during a concentrated blitz of the city, which also destroyed over 4000 homes, and three quarters of its factories.

The building of a new Coventry Cathedral was intended as a national symbol of rebirth after the conflict of 1939-1945, and the earlier great war of 1914-18. The project became as much symbolic and spiritual as physical. It proved to also be an international symbol of healing and renewal of enormous significance, with which all nations involved in the great wars of the twentieth century identified. The new Coventry Cathedral was consecrated by the first performance of the War Requiem on 30th May 1962.

The commission gave Britten complete artistic freedom. He had long wanted to set the poems of Owen to music and to also to create a major musical statement which would express his own deeply held passivist convictions. The inspiration came to him to set Owen’s poems within the liturgical framework of the Latin Mass for the Dead. In preparing the working score for his Requiem, Britten carefully edited the poems to intertwine them within the context of the Latin Requiem Mass.

There are three distinct levels or planes of musical expression within the Requiem. The first and most intimate is that of the string orchestra within which the poems are set, and are conceived as a dialogue between two soldiers, one German and one English. Because of his extensive musical friendships, he was able to ask the great German Baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau to express the voice of the German soldier; his own partner and lifetime musical collaborator Peter Pears took on the Tenor voice of the English soldier. This is the central and most intimate inner core of the Requiem, and to which the string orchestra provides a highly responsive accompaniment.

The second level of musical expression is the more formal liturgy of the Latin Mass for the Dead, set for full symphony orchestra, full chorus, and a solo soprano voice. The Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya agreed to take the soprano role as soloist in the Mass of the Dead. She was however prevented from coming by the Soviet State, as all this was happening in the height of the Cold War. This level represents the formal, ancient ritual expression of mourning and a liturgical plea for the deliverance of the whole of humanity from the ravages of war.

The Requiem is divided into six movements, which preserve the sequence of the structure of the Proper and Ordinary of the Latin Requiem Mass. The opening movement, (Requiem Eternam), includes the Introit and Kyrie. The second movement of the Requiem includes the Dies Irae, the third the Offertorium, the fourth contains the Sanctus and Benedictus, the fifth the Agnus Dei, and the sixth and final movement is the Libere Me.

The third level of musical expression is a choir of boys’ voices accompanied by organ. Physically they are set at a distance, representing perhaps an angelic chorus, ushering the doomed young soldiers into heaven after their tragic war-torn lives on earth. The musical forces are therefore divided into three groups that alternate and interact with each other, finally combining together at the end of the last movement.

Notes on the poems and their orchestration

Requiem Eternam:

Anthem for Doomed Youth (1917)

For Owen, the fundamental issue underlying all these poems was that the soldiers of all armies involved in the struggle were enduring a living death, and were already literally in hell. This is intertwined with a bitter disillusioned denouncement of Christianity, in which any hope of redemption lies in the heroic Christ-like sacrifice of the soldiers themselves. This is made clear in the opening poem in the Requiem, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’. In this poem there is a bitter, ironic inter-play between, references (in bold italics) of the Christian liturgy, and the Hell in which all soldiers were suffering.

“What passing-bells for those that die like cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns,

Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries for them from prayers or bells,

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells…”

Dies Irae:

Bugles Sang (1918)

There is a poignant, wistful sadness in these lines, witnessing the soldiers drifting off to sleep, not knowing whether the next day would be their last:

“Voices of boys were by the river-side.

Sleep mothered them; and left the twilight sad…”

The Next War (1917)

In this poem, there is a bitter, chilling, jocular almost intimate attitude towards death, in which it is personalised as an ever-present menace, including the chlorine gas attacks each side launched at the other. This is sung by both the British and the German soldier.

As Owen saw it, they were equally vulnerable to slaughter in its most grisly form:

“We’ve sniffed the green thick odour of his breath, -

Our eyes wept, but our courage didn’t writhe.

He’s spat at us with bullets, and he’s coughed Shrapnel…

Oh, Death was never an enemy of ours!”

On Seeing a Piece of Our Artillery Brought into Action (1918)

Both the German and the Allied armies had huge howitzer mortar guns, the weapons of mass destruction of their day. However, the weapon that Owen chooses to curse in this poem, is British. For him, by that time in the war, it seems to have made no difference whether allied soldiers were being destroyed by German weaponry, or vice versa. For him, all war was evil, and there was no ‘good cause’ to support. Death and destruction rained down upon all soldiers alike, of whatever nationality.

“ Be slowly lifted up, thou long black arm,

Great Gun towering toward Heaven, about to curse;

Reach at that arrogance that 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!”

Futility (1918)

The winter of 1917/18 was especially severe, and soldiers were struggling to survive in a sea of freezing mud. One of Owen’s men in January 1918, died of exposure. The poem starts as a tender lament, that even the warmth of the midday sun was in vain, but then goes on to call into question the meaning of the long journey of evolution on this planet.

“…Was it for this the clay grew tall?

Oh, what made fatuous sunbeams toil

To break earth’s sleep at all?”

Offertorium:

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young (1918)

With bitter and ironic savagery, Owen sacrilegiously inverts the Old Testament parable of Abraham and Isaac. In his version, Abraham binds his son ‘with the belts and straps’ of the soldiers in the trenches. When an angel from Heaven calls upon him to sacrifice the ‘Ram of Pride’ instead of his son, Abraham ignores him and slays his son:

“ …Behold, a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns,

Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,

And half the seed of Europe, one by one."

Owen sees the ‘Ram of Pride’ as representing all those hierarchies of command, whether religious or military, which upheld the necessity of prosecuting the war whatever of cost, the sacrifice being the young men of all armies on both sides of the conflict.

Sanctus:

The End (1917)

Although he uses religious imagery, Owen questions whether any absolution is possible, and whether the doctrine of the Last Judgement has any validity:

“Shall life renew these bodies? Of a truth

All death will He annul, all tears assuage?

…It is death.

Mine ancient scars shall not be glorified,

Nor my titanic tears, the sea, be dried.”

Agnus Dei:

At a Calvary near Ancre (1917)

Owen re-tells the story of the Crucifixion, setting it in no-mans-land. In his re-telling of it, the Church sends its priests to the trenches, where they watch on in scorn, very much as the philistines had in the bible.

The soldiers themselves make the ultimate sacrifice, laying down their lives:

“The scribes on all the people shove

And bawl allegiance to the state,

But they who love the greater love

Lay down their life; they do not hate."

In a letter written from the front-lines to his mother he said: “Passivity at any price! Suffer dishonour and disgrace, but never resort to arms. Be bullied, be outraged, be killed, but do not kill. It may be chimerical and an ignominious principle, but there it is. It can only be ignored; and I think pulpit professionals are ignoring it very skilfully and successfully. …Christ literally is in no man’s land. There men often hear his voice…Greater love has no man but to lay down his life for a friend. Is it spoken only in English or French? I do not think so.” This led him to a sense that the true Christian spirit was to be found in fraternal love between fellow soldiers, whether English, French or German, all of whom who were being, as he envisioned it, crucified.

Libera Me:

Strange Meeting (1918)

The culminating poem in the Requiem is Strange Meeting, in which two dead soldiers, who have killed each other, one English, one German meet and discover a sense of brotherhood between them.

The place of encounter is in fact hell, or somewhere in the catacombs leading to it:

"And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall, by his dead smile,

I knew we stood in Hell.”

Britten deleted these lines from the text, perhaps because in terms of the Requiem Mass for the Dead, the liturgy required the hope of eternal reconciliation in heaven.

This was not a hope shared by Owen. The final lines of the poem are:

“I am the enemy you killed my friend

I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned

Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

Let us sleep now."

The Requiem itself ends in the profound irony of In Paradisum, where the boys’ choir, the soprano and the full orchestral choir usher these tormented damned souls, as Owen saw them, into a paradise, in which they themselves had long since ceased to believe:

“Rest Eternal grant them, Lord,

And may ever-lasting light shine upon them.

May they rest in Peace, Amen.”

There is a strange paradox at the heart of Britten’s War Requiem. The framework for the poems is the intensely formal Latin Mass for the Dead, with all the sentiments and beliefs of the Christian faith. The poems themselves however, are intensely critical of the hypocrisy of Christianity in supporting the war effort; nothing could have been further from the essential message of Christianity than to endorse the wholesale slaughter of millions of young men in the armies fighting the conflict.

There is one constantly re-occurring musical motif, that of the tri-tone, known as the augmented fourth, or diminished fifth. It is not a ‘pretty’ sound, and is somewhat dissonant and jarring to listen to. For this reason, it has sometimes been referred to as an ‘outcast’ or ‘scapegoat’ series of notes. During the middle ages it was banned by church leaders who referred to it as ‘diabolus in musica’, deemed unsuitable for use in Christian worship. Britten was very well aware of this, and its use in the War Requiem may be an intended, ironic comment which calls into question the intended ultimate message of the traditional Requiem mass: that the Mass somehow enables the possibility that souls should rest in peace.

It may be that the Requiem Mass itself became for Britten a subject for attack or at least serious questioning. As used in his Requiem, it questions the traditional dependency on religion to provide ‘balm for the soul’, and calls into question any simplistic absolution. Is any absolution possible when faced with the catastrophes of world war, and the deaths of millions? Perhaps Owen and Britten were at one here in challenging whether the traditional Christian ritual of the Mass was relevant anymore.

For Britten, this was an intensely personal coming together of his personal and musical convictions. An essential element of his musical personality was its moral basis. It was essential for him that his music become the expression of his deepest values and beliefs, the most fundamental of which was his abhorrence of violence in all its forms and his life-long belief in Passivism.

These beliefs were not easy to hold and sustain in an era where the globe had been overwhelmed by war, and unquestioning allegiance to one side or the other sought. This dilemma is well put by Coleman & Montero (1999): "Because these beliefs were not consonant with the world around him, his music became the language of a prophet, who lived, as prophets often do, on a fragile boundary between the Wilderness and the Ruler’s Court.” As with many prophets before him, including Wilfred Owen himself, his message was about the tragedy of violence, injustice, innocence betrayed, e tragedy of war.

The Impact of the War Requiem

The first performance of the Requiem took place less than twenty years after the end of the Second World War. Millions of families across the globe had suffered the death of loved ones, and were still recovering from the even greater cataclysm in terms of deaths of the First World War. The world was reeling from a half century of human slaughter on a scale never before experienced. Britten himself had lost a number of close friends in the war, and dedicated the Requiem to them. The Russian, German and English performers themselves represented the main protagonists of the cataclysm that had all too recently engulfed the world. He also challenges us to reflect on whether societies that are underpinned in a belief in the afterlife, redemption and ever-lasting peace, can ever in a fundamental way, seek lasting peace.

As a composer of genius, Britten was somehow able to give musical expression to the universal need for healing, forgiveness and redemption that existed at that time. The War Requiem made an overwhelming impact at its first performance and for many years after. It is one of only a handful of English compositions to have gained a place in the established international musical repertoire. It has received countless performances since, and there are over twenty recordings.

Recommended Recording

The classic recording and still the finest, is that conducted by Britten himself in 1963, a few weeks after the first performance itself in Coventry Cathedral, and which has been remastered. It contains 20 minutes of a recording of Britten working with the orchestra and choirs in rehearsal.

Benjamin Britten War Requiem remastered 2006 Decca

Soloists: Peter Pears, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Galina Vishnevskaya London Symphony Orchestra

The finest book of collected poems of the First World War, including most of Owen’s, is The Winter of the World: Poems of the First World War edited by Dominic Hibberd and John Onions, 2007.

Questions to Consider

• To what degree do you think Britten’s vision of personalising the poems as a dialogue between a British and a German soldier works dramatically and musically?

• Is setting these poems within the framework of a Latin Mass for the Dead effective? Does it add or subtract from the overall musical effect?

• The War Requiem clearly had an enormous impact nationally and internationally in the 1960’s. Do you think it still has a role in the current modern repertory? If so why?

• What impact has listening to the War Requiem had upon you?

References

Colman A and Montero P (1999): Programme notes for the San Francisco Choral Society performance of the War Requiem

Cooke M (1996): Britten War Requiem, Cambridge Music Handbook

Cuthbertson G (2014): Wilfred Owen

Hibberd D (2003): Wilfred Owen, Phoenix

Hibberd D & Onions J (2007): The Winter of the World: Poems of the First World War, Constable