Last week I had the rare opportunity to see Benjamin Britten's War Requiem (1961) done by the orchestra and chorus of the Lisbon São Carlos Opera. It is a fine piece, and is not done often because of the large forces required: big orchestra, chorus, chamber orchestra (12-13 players), children's chorus with organ, and 3 vocal soloists. The São Carlos musicians are doing very big complex pieces this year at various sites around the country, since they are unable to use their under-renovation opera house. As a result Lisbon music lovers are reaping the benefits in hearing some big rare pieces like this one and a well-played Mahler Eighth Symphony last fall. This performance was well conducted by Graeme Jenkins, with Portuguese soloists Silvia Sequeira, Marco Alves dos Santos, and André Baleiro, all of whom sang with excellent English diction. The company provided an excellent program book with full texts and translations (into Portuguese), along with projected Portuguese supratitles.
Britten is perhaps the most innovative and distinguished of the 20th century British composers. His music is creative, unfailingly intelligent, and sometimes dramatic and compelling. It can also verge towards a sort of sterile academic coolness at times. All of these characteristics were on display during this performance. This requiem mass for the dead premiered during the depths of the Cold War, and initial performances featured a Russian soprano, British tenor, and German baritone, symbolizing a hoped-for peaceful co-existence of these WWII enemies. Equally symbolic was the premiere's use to consecrate the new Coventry Cathedral, destroyed by German bombs during WWII. Britten (1913-1976) was a pacifist who lived through both great world wars, but did not serve in WWII due to his conscientious objector status. So there is certainly no triumph of battle here, but rather a pacifist's plea. The War Requiem contrasts the traditional Latin requiem mass (done by the large orchestra and choir) with poignant (anti) war poems by the British WWI poet Winifred Owen, performed by the small chamber orchestra along with the tenor and baritone soloists. The children's chorus offstage sings rather eerie interjections during the Latin mass passages, accompanied by a polytonal organ. The general effect is to contrast the traditions of the Latin mass, done in a mainstream 20th century style, with the passionate poetic outpourings of Owen, an injured WWI soldier-poet. His tragic poems about soldiers on the WWI front were composed as part of his own therapy for shell shock and other trauma, and were mostly composed during his recuperation in England. He later returned to the WWI front and was killed in 1918. The poems are remarkable, filled with his admiration, love, and perhaps sexual attraction for all these young men of Europe lying killed in the trenches. The first poem sung in this Requiem is "Anthem for a Doomed Youth", beginning:
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
You can read the whole poem, as well as others by this remarkable poet,
here. The allusion to dead men as cattle, right after the choir's calm intoning of "Requiem aeternam" (Grant them eternal rest, o Lord) is jarring, and sets the tone for the entire piece, juxtaposing a (false?) Christian certainty about the resurrection of the dead with the realities of rotting corpses on the battlefield. The interjected innocence of the children's choir adds to the ironic tone. The piece ends after about 90 minutes of similarly violent contrasts, with the poem
"Strange Meeting" about a British soldier wandering through an eerie bombed-out tunnel, meeting a ghostly young man, whom he befriends. But this is actually the spirit of the enemy soldier that he had killed the prior day in hand-to-hand combat. This ending, with the children singing the
In Paradisum (May the angels lead you into paradise), is very affecting. Overall the concept of this Requiem is brilliant, like much of Britten's output. In execution, his musical settings of Owen's poems sometimes do not match the poignancy of the poet's texts. This reminds me that often the most successful operas are set to mediocre texts, then elevate them. Its harder to elevate texts that are already brilliant, as these poems are. In this performance I wish I had heard the poem texts more clearly. In the1961 premiere, Britten had his favorite tenor (and partner) Peter Pears sing, and Pears (shown in the below photo left, with Britten at the piano) was known for otherworldly diction and clarity, which would have been welcome here.
As I listened to this compelling piece, I thought about how composers have struggled to reconcile the certainties of traditional Catholic religious texts with the violence and decreasing spirituality of the modern world. How do you compose music to religious texts in our era? In the Ninth Symphony (1824) Beethoven chose to close his Ninth symphony with a poem by Schiller that was secular, not religious (An die Freude). The poem evokes Greek, not Christian deities ("Joy, daughter of Elysium"). For Beethoven we can achieve salvation, but it comes comes from an ambiguously non-Christian "creative spirit". One hundred years later in his Eighth Symphony (1910) Mahler has similar ideas. He contrasts a Catholic hymn in part I (Veni, Creator Spiritus) with the famed romantic passage from the end of Goethe's Faust in which (Faust) and humanity) are redeemed by the "Eternal Feminine" leading us onward, rather than God. This idealizes the romantic era's passion for the triumph of mankind's creativity. But even this romantic ideal was killed by the horrors of the world war that came only four years later, a point that Britten seems to be making in the War Requiem. Britten has little taste for humanistic optimism or resurrection. Is there any hope for the modern world? A decade later the Catholic celebrant/protagonist of Bernstein's Mass (1971) loses his faith in the church, but a musical surge of post-1960's optimism allows the piece to end with a sort of tie-dyed, flower child/rock-based power-of-the-people uplift, an optimism that seems a bit dated now. In common to the Britten and Bernstein masses are a big traditional orchestra chorus performing the Catholic rite, contrasting with a small ensemble performing more modern, topical poetry (Owen's poems for Britten, rock lyrics for Bernstein). The old tradition has separated from the modern, and reconciliation is difficult, if not impossible. In our more cynical age, I think the Britten piece ages better than Mahler's or Bernstein's visions. However, all of these big pieces are fascinating and brilliant attempts of courageous composers to address the decline of organized religion in the West that has been with us since at least the Renaissance.
Hi Frazier, thanks for a very good review!
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