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Reflections on and around Britten’s War Requiem at Yale
MERVYN COOKE
Adapted from the Tangeman Lecture delivered 28 April 2007
On 28 April 2007 a magnificent performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem was given in Woolsey Hall, New Haven, by the Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale under the conductor Shinik Hahm, with Sara Jakubiak, James Taylor, and Detlef Roth the soprano, tenor, and baritone soloists, the Yale Schola Cantorum, Yale Camerata, Yale Glee Club, Trinity Church Boys’ and Girls’ Choirs, and Elm City Girls’ Choir; the performance had been given by the same forces at Boston’s Symphony Hall on the previous day. Before the Yale concert it was my privilege to offer some thoughts on Britten’s work in the shape of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music’s annual Tangeman Lecture. Our discussion focused not only on Britten’s economical and highly communicative musical idiom, but also on the various levels of irony presented by this multi-layered and thought-provoking score, which brings together —often in direct and disquieting collisions—vernacular settings of anti-war texts by the First World War poet Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), delivered in English by solo tenor and baritone voices with chamber-orchestral accompaniment, and the Latin Missa pro defunctis, declaimed by an operatic soprano soloist, large choir, and full orchestra; these together provide a more conventional backdrop sometimes reminiscent of the operatic style of Giuseppe Verdi. Britten’s work had been commissioned in the late 1950s to mark the consecration of the modern cathedral built at Coventry (in the British county of Warwickshire), the city’s old cathedral having been destroyed by German bombing in November 1940; his score was first performed in the new building, designed by the architect Basil Spence and poignantly erected alongside the ruins of the medieval building it replaced, on 30 May 1962.
In the present essay, rather than rehearse details of the work’s structure and musico-textual content which are well known and readily accessible in published form,1 I would like to offer a few reflections on the War Requiem, both from a personal perspective and in order to shed some light on Britten’s general attitudes towards church music and universities during the period in which the work was composed. Two other Britten compositions will prove to be of relevance in exploring these contexts: his Missa Brevis in D, Op. 63, for boys’ voices and organ (1959), in which he explored ways of writing for children that would be directly echoed in the music for boys’ choir in the War Requiem, and his Cantata Academica, Carmen Basiliense, Op. 62, commissioned by the University of Basle in 1958 and first performed there in 1960.
Elsewhere I have noted how performances of the War Requiem so frequently take place in emotive public circumstances that it is often exceptionally difficult to maintain a degree of critical objectivity towards the piece, all the more so on account of the sometimes harrowing imagery in Owen’s poetry and the unimpeachable nature of the work’s central pacifist message.2 The trend for performing the work on military anniversaries started in 1964 when Britten and Meredith Davies jointly conducted it at a BBC Promenade Concert in London’s Royal Albert Hall; the performance was timed to commence at 8 p.m. on 8 August—precisely fifty years to the minute after Britain declared war on Germany in 1914. (This concert was the first to sell out in that year’s Proms season.) The work’s German premiere had already taken place on Armistice Day 1962, at the hands of the Berlin Philharmonic under Colin Davis. Later evocative performances in Germany included two held in cities that had been devastated by Allied attacks during the Second World War: Münster (1964) and Dresden (1965). As at Coventry, the cathedral at Münster had been destroyed by bombing; Dresden had suffered an appalling degree of destruction in a massive air raid on 13 February 1945, in which some thirty-five thousand innocent civilians had been killed. The War Requiem performance in that city was scheduled to coincide exactly with the twentieth anniversary of an event that was not only one of the most controversial aerial bombardments in history, but one that directly led to the branding of British and Americans as terrorists. Later notable anniversary-oriented performances included two in May 1991: one was held at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens in order to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Operation Mercury, the bloody invasion of Crete by Nazi paratroopers, and the other in Jerusalem to mark the ceasefire then current in the troubled region. On the latter occasion, it was related how at an earlier performance of the score an Israeli soldier had broken down because “until he heard Owen’s words to Britten’s music he had been unable to share his experience with anyone.”3
In the United Kingdom the War Requiem has for many years been routinely performed on or around Remembrance Sunday – the Sunday in November closest to 11 November (Veterans’ Day in the United States), the date in 1918 on which the Armistice concluding the First World War was signed. As with other major military anniversaries, these occasions can be an unsettling mixture of compassionate remembrance, patriotism, and guilt. It is interesting to speculate as to whether Britten’s composition of the War Requiem was to some degree a personal act of expiation from the pen of a committed pacifist who had refused to fight in the Second World War on the grounds of conscientious objection: guilt is generally considered to be a common enough feeling amongst those not involved in the fighting undertaken by their contemporaries (Owen’s friend and mentor Siegfried Sassoon wrote an evocative poem about it during a period of convalescence),4 and Britten’s score is explicitly dedicated to the memory of four deceased friends, three of whom were killed in the Second World War.5 Britten certainly had no interest in patriotism, a topic of conversation which (as Robert Graves tells us) was ruthlessly stamped out by soldiers serving in the trenches; religion was also a strictly taboo subject at the front line in the First World War,6 and the War Requiem implies much about the deficiencies of organized religion and the platitudes of the liturgy when confronted with the obscene inhumanity of the battlefield. Britten would undoubtedly have been somewhat uneasy to know that his score has frequently been presented as part of carefully stage-managed patriotic remembrances: indeed, the expectations attendant upon this kind of performance setting are so strong that when I conducted the work myself in Mansfield, England, with a student orchestra from the University of Nottingham on Remembrance Sunday in 1998, I afterwards received a rather stern letter from an elderly member of the audience expressing regret that we had not prefaced the concert with a rousing performance of the British national anthem.
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