Commentary
Requiem aeternam
The inclusion of the Owen poems in a religious work would be remarkable enough but this is no mere song-cycle: the verses are frequently aligned so as to subvert the liturgy and invest the ancient words with new and uncomfortable resonances. The tritone C / F sharp permeates the work and forms the basis for the opening Requiem aeternam which is underpinned by these notes, heard first on bells. Each phrase of the boys’ section beginning ‘Te decet hymnus’ also opens on one of these pitches and closes on the other; between them, their answering phrases span all twelve tones and recall the interlocking lines of the Sanctus from Britten’s Missa brevis op. 63. It is however ‘passing-bells’ which appear in the first Owen poem, whose final line joins the worlds, being an augmented restatement of the boys’ first phrase. A ‘Kyrie eleison’ for the main chorus ends the section, a verse permeated with the tritone and resolved by a memorably unsettling sidestep to a chord of F major, which Britten also employs to close the second and sixth movements.
Dies irae and Offertorium
In the Dies Irae, the trumpets of the Day of Wrath are echoed by Owen’s ‘Bugles sang, sadd’ning the evening air’, while the tears of ‘Lacrimosa dies illa’ in the same movement are enlarged by the grief of the soldier finding the body of his friend in ‘Move him into the sun’. The Offertorium incorporates Owen’s version of the story of Abraham and Isaac, which is given a darker patina by the words of the boys’ choir which Britten placed immediately afterwards (‘Hostias et preces tibi Domine laudis offerimus’); this includes quotations from Britten’s own Canticle II, ‘Abraham and Isaac’ but now in Owen’s horrific retelling (partly quoted above), with its devastating dismissal of the interceding angel and the completion of Isaac’s sacrifice. Mention of the archangel Michael, heavenly standard-bearer, is heralded by a jaunty phrase which becomes a rollicking march-like fugue, whose subject is also taken from Britten’s Canticle II but the reiterated fugal promise to sustain Abraham’s children peters out in a horrified mutter.
Sanctus
Similarly, the hosannas of the liturgical Sanctus are nullified by the utterly black denial of salvation in Owen’s ‘After the blast of lightning from the East’. The newcomer to the work will not fail to notice some of the extraordinary scoring in the Sanctus, which opens with shimmering, gamelan-influenced tremolos for percussion on the tritone-pitches of C and F sharp, a further conflation of Owen’s passing-bells and the Sanctus bells of the liturgy. The composer’s decision to employ approximate pitches for the free-chanting chorus at this point was made later on during the composition process. Writers have often commented on the similarities between Britten’s Requiem and that of Verdi, particularly in the two turbulent versions of the Dies Irae; but, as Britten wryly commented: ‘I think I would be a fool if I didn’t take notice of how Mozart, Verdi, Dvorak—whoever you care to name—had written their Masses … If I have not absorbed that, that’s too bad. But that’s because I’m not a good enough composer, it’s not because I’m wrong.’
Agnus Dei and Libera me
Britten’s Canticle III, ‘Still falls the Rain’, also addresses violence, being a setting of Edith Sitwell’s terrifying poem allying the raids of the Blitz to the ‘nineteen hundred and forty nails / Upon the Cross’; yet ‘the voice of One’ remains to bless mankind on the final page. In War Requiem the one completely consoling movement is its still centre, the juxtaposition of Owen’s At a Calvary near the Ancre with the timeless prayer for peace of the ‘Agnus Dei’—although Owen (and Britten) do not shrink from condemning the ecclesiastical hierarchy who have fallen into the sin of pride, thus denying their God and condoning the sentencing of boys to their deaths: ‘The scribes on all the people shove / And bawl allegiance to the State’. The final line of this movement, ‘Dona nobis pacem’ is taken from the Ordinary of the Mass, not the Requiem Mass and was apparently included at the suggestion of Peter Pears. ‘If [Britten] refuses to portray a God of wrath’ writes Peter Evans, ‘his man-made dies irae must appear the more terrible a denial of the God of pity so sublimely invoked elsewhere.’ The closing pages of the work are immensely cathartic as the soldiers’ refrain ‘Let us sleep now’ is gradually overwhelmed by the ‘In paradisum’ of the choirs and chorus. However, this mood is not allowed to remain and the tritone-tolling bells which punctuate the final ‘Requiescat in pace’ return the listener to the mourning world before a final unsettling sidestep to F major (heard twice before in the work) underlines a curious and strangely cold Amen to the concluding prayer, ‘Requiescat in pace’. The artist Sidney Nolan—who made many visual studies inspired by Britten’s music—reported that the composer once told him: ‘It’s a kind of reparation. That’s what the War Requiem is about; it is reparation’.
A requiem to ‘disturb every living soul’
The culmination of Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia is a despairing question, ‘Is this it all?’, answered by the Male Chorus uncertainly but with some degree of optimism: ‘In His Passion is our hope’. This assertion echoes the trust of the ‘Agnus Dei’ in the War Requiem but at the close of that work the composer forbears to end with ‘It is not all’, preferring to respect Owen’s lines placed at the head of the score: ‘All a poet can do today is warn.’ One thinks too of another Owen poem, ‘The Kind Ghosts’, set by Britten in his Nocturne (1958) with such mellifluousness and calm simplicity that its cynicism sometimes passes unnoticed in performance. Britannia’s wilful refusal to acknowledge the cost of maintaining her comfortable status quo was censured with even greater directness in Auden’s ‘A Summer Night’, the dark troubled heart of Britten’s Spring Symphony (1949):
And, gentle, do not care to know,
Where Poland draws her Eastern bow,
What violence is done;
Nor ask what doubtful act allows
Our freedom in this English house,
Our picnics in the sun.
For that ‘half the seed of Europe’ who remain to mourn England’s grim ‘wall of boys on boys’, it is true that few words may be of comfort; indeed, The Times commented of the War Requiem: ‘It is not a Requiem to console the living; sometimes it does not even help the dead to sleep soundly. It can only disturb every living soul, for it denounces the barbarism more or less awake in mankind with all the authority that a great composer can muster’.
Andrew Plant
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