A Plea for Peace: Britten’s War Requiem

About the Work

The War Requiem was written for a building’s resurrection. On the night of 14 November 1940, German bombing reduced the medieval cathedral of Coventry to a roofless shell. Rather than clear the ruins away, the city chose to preserve them and to raise a new cathedral beside the old: a modern building by Basil Spence, consecrated on 25 May 1962 as a deliberate emblem of reconciliation rather than revenge. Britten, the most famous pacifist in English music, was the natural choice to compose the centrepiece of the festival marking that consecration. He accepted at once, and produced what many regard as his supreme achievement and one of the central works of the twentieth century.

What Britten conceived was not a setting of the Latin Requiem Mass alone, but a confrontation between two worlds. Into the ancient liturgy of the dead he interleaved nine poems by Wilfred Owen, the young English officer killed in action a week before the Armistice of 1918, whose verse stripped away every comforting illusion about war. On the title page Britten placed Owen’s own words: ‘My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity… All a poet can do today is warn.’ The whole work is, in effect, an argument between the Mass’s prayers for rest and Owen’s unflinching reports from the trenches, between consolation offered and consolation refused.

To dramatise that argument, Britten divided his forces into three distinct planes of sound, each with its own music and its own meaning. A soprano soloist, large mixed chorus, and full orchestra carry the public, ceremonial Latin liturgy. Two male soloists, a tenor and a baritone, accompanied by a separate chamber orchestra, deliver Owen’s intimate English poems, as if two soldiers were speaking from within the larger rite. And set apart in the distance, a boys’ choir with organ sings fragments of the liturgy with an unearthly, disembodied purity, suspended above the human drama. The boys are meant to sound remote: heaven heard from far off, innocence untouched by the carnage below.

Britten built his soloists as a gesture of reconciliation in themselves, choosing a Russian, a German, and an Englishman to stand together: the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, the baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and the tenor Peter Pears, his own partner. Cold War politics intervened: Soviet authorities would not let Vishnevskaya travel to Coventry, so Heather Harper sang the premiere with ten days’ notice. The symbolism survived all the same, for Vishnevskaya was later allowed to travel to London, and all three sang on the celebrated 1963 Decca recording the composer conducted.

The first performance, in the new Coventry Cathedral on 30 May 1962, was a triumph, and critics and audiences there, in London and abroad, hailed it as a contemporary masterpiece. Britten had written something that spoke far beyond the occasion: a work that used the most public of forms to make the most personal of pleas. The 1963 recording sold 200,000 copies within five months, and the work’s standing has only grown. The War Requiem is at once a Requiem Mass, a war memorial, and a pacifist manifesto, and its power lies in its refusal to let any one of those things console us into forgetting the others. It does not end in triumph or even in certainty; it ends, after Owen’s vision of two dead enemies meeting in the underworld, in a long, ambiguous farewell that lets the boys’ distant voices and the unresolved bells of the orchestra have something close to the last word.

What to Listen For

The key to hearing the War Requiem is the interval of the tritone: the restless, unsettled gap between two notes (here C and F-sharp) that medieval theorists nicknamed ‘the devil in music.’ Britten threads it through the entire work, sounding it in the very first bars as the chorus murmurs ‘Requiem aeternam’ over tolling bells. It is the sound of unrest, of a peace not yet granted, and you will hear it return at every major seam until, at the close, it is at last allowed to settle. Train your ear on that, and the whole vast structure comes into focus.

Listen, too, for the three planes of sound and how Britten keeps them apart. The Latin Mass arrives in great public blocks: the terrifying brass and battering chorus of the ‘Dies irae,’ the day of wrath, which storms back several times like a recurring nightmare; the soprano riding high and fierce above the orchestra. Against this, the tenor and baritone enter quietly with Owen’s English poems, accompanied only by the chamber orchestra, a sudden shift to chamber-scale intimacy that feels like stepping from a cathedral nave into a muddy dugout. Notice how Owen’s words answer and undercut the Latin: after the ‘Dies irae’ trumpets, the baritone sings ‘Bugles sang, saddening the evening air’; and in the opening movement the tenor’s ‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?’ turns the funeral liturgy into bitter accusation.

Above and behind it all, listen for the boys’ choir, placed at a distance with chamber organ, whose cool, sexless lines float in from another acoustic world, as if untouched by what is happening below. Their remoteness is the point.

Two moments repay special attention. In the ‘Offertorium,’ as the chorus prays the old promise made to Abraham and his seed, the two men retell the story of Abraham and Isaac, but in Owen’s savage rewriting the angel’s voice goes unheeded, and the old man slays his son ‘and half the seed of Europe, one by one.’ The boys’ choir keeps singing the liturgy’s promise of deliverance, serene and oblivious, while below them the killing repeats. And at the very end, the tenor and baritone, enemies in life, meet as the dead in Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting,’ singing together ‘Let us sleep now…’ Their voices interweave and gradually still, the boys and chorus draw the whole work toward the radiant ‘In paradisum,’ and then the tolling tritone returns one final time, only now resolving at last into a quiet, hard-won chord. Whether that resolution is peace or merely exhaustion, Britten leaves for you to decide.