{ Program Notes
Benjamin Britten
loss of life —most tragically many children
evacuated for their “safety” from London
— the chief catastrophe of that fiery night
was the total destruction of Coventry’s
prized medieval Cathedral of St. Michael.
One of England’s symbolic acts of
post-war recovery was the rebuilding
of Coventry Cathedral. But, as many
audience members may have seen for
themselves in visits to the U.K., the
new Cathedral — a bold contemporary structure designed by Sir Basil
Spence and decorated by such prominent
British artists as Graham Sutherland and
Henry Moore — did not rise from the
ashes of the old, but instead stands in
haunting proximity to the original Cathedral’s blackened shell. The rebuilders
had chosen to leave the memory of that
terrible night in 1940 to be contemplated
by generations to come.
The leaders of Coventry also caused another powerful memorial to the devastation of two world wars to be created when
they asked Benjamin Britten to write a
work for the Cathedral’s rededication ceremonies on May 30, 1962. As England’s
leading composer of the post-war period,
Britten was the logical choice for such a
commission. But beyond his undisputed
24 O v ertur e |
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Cathedral of St. Michael
musical gifts — especially his mastery of
operatic and choral forms — he was a
deeply committed pacifist and had been a
conscientious objector throughout World
War II. He saw the commission as a philosophical as well as a musical opportunity:
a forum for expressing his profound convictions about the futility and barbarism
of all wars — even the so-called “Good
War” of 1939–1945.
Britten was a deeply
committed pacifist and had
been a conscientious
objector throughout
World War II.
Britten’s War Requiem is like no other
musical requiem in that it combines the
traditional liturgy of the Latin Mass for
the Dead with the tough, unsentimental
poetry of a man who was himself a victim
of war. Wilfred Owen was an officer in
the British Army during World War I
and also a poet of rare quality. Convinced
there was no glory in dying for one’s
country, he wrote about what he really
saw — the mud, the mangled bodies, the
“green thick odour” of death — and what
he really felt — that war was a meaningless
waste, with men slaughtering other men
whose lives and dreams were much like
their own. Tragically, his eloquence was
silenced by a bullet just weeks before the
Armistice. He was 25.
Britten, whose greatest works usually sprang from his remarkable literary
sensibilities, chose portions of nine of
Owen’s poems and set them in juxtaposition to the Requiem text in ways that
are at times complementary, at others
jarring. He assigned these texts to tenor
and baritone soloists, accompanied by
a chamber orchestra of 13 players. The
Requiem portions were written for large
adult chorus and orchestra with a soprano
soloist. A third group, also associated
with the liturgical text, is the children’s
chorus, accompanied by organ. Writing
with a cathedral acoustic in mind, Britten
intended these three performing groups to
be separated spatially so that they would
make distinctly different aural impressions
on the listener.
Adding to the symbolic power of
the War Requiem, Britten assigned the
solo parts for the premiere to three