War Requiem

The large plan resists the subtractive test. Each Owen poem is set where the liturgy calls it. “Anthem for Doomed Youth” answers a prayer for eternal rest with “die as cattle”; the Calvary poem sits inside the Agnus Dei; the parable of Abram sits inside the promise to Abraham, so that removing either the fugue or the poem kills the other. “Strange Meeting” must come where the responsory begs deliverance from death, the only place the two soldiers meet the dead. Length is not charged. The give is in the Dies irae: four poems in more than a quarter of an hour, two of them tied loosely to the sequence, and long stretches for brass and chorus that restate. The Sanctus’s poem could change places without loss.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it is the work’s own, not only Owen’s: the liturgy of consolation and the experience of the dead soldier do not speak to each other, and the rite that buries the young also blesses those who send them. The Offertorium makes it a proposition. God’s promise to Abraham and his seed is sung in a confident fugue; Owen’s Abram slays his son anyway; and the promise is sung again, softly, as if nothing had been said. “Strange Meeting” adds a second truth, that the enemy is a mirror. Held below the top: much of the disclosure was made by Owen in 1918, the work’s share being the juxtaposition, and the reconciliation of the close blunts the indictment.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Height is reached often, in both registers. The sublime of dread: the fanfares of the Dies irae, and the climax of the Libera me, where a slow march gathers the whole orchestra and breaks off into the chamber group and the tenor’s first words in hell. The sublime of stillness: the bells under “Requiem aeternam”; the soprano’s Lacrimosa above “Futility”; the soprano over tuned percussion at the head of the Sanctus; the tenor’s “Dona nobis pacem”; and the close, where the soldiers’ lullaby and In paradisum sound together. Every movement rises at least once. Held off the ceiling because some stretches are rhetorical rather than elevated: the choral writing of the Dies irae repeats its gestures, and the fugue’s outer statements are bright where they need to be terrible.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Myth built, not evoked. The sacrifice of the son is the hinge of the Offertorium, and the work stages the old story against its own liturgy: the ram is offered and refused, and the binding becomes a massacre. The Mass for the dead is itself the frame, a rite whose sacrifice is now the soldiers. The Calvary poem sets the crucified figure at a crossroads of shelled roads, where priests stroll and soldiers bear the cross. “Strange Meeting” is a descent to the underworld and a meeting with the double, in the oldest form. The particulars stay exact: a gun, a bugle, the sun on a dead man’s face, a wayside crucifix. Held lower because the myths are Owen’s and the liturgy’s, chosen and juxtaposed rather than made, and the boys are nearer emblem than figure.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The inheritance is the concert requiem of Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi and Brahms’s vernacular German Requiem; the Passion’s practice, in Bach, of interleaving a sacred narrative with commentary; Tippett’s A Child of Our Time (1941); and Britten’s own Sinfonia da Requiem and Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac. The departure: the liturgy itself is interrupted and contradicted by secular poems of war, at a national consecration, inside a cathedral, the forces split into three planes that do not meet until the end. The stake was real: a pacifist who had registered as a conscientious objector writing for a rite of remembrance a text that accuses the old men who send the young. Held near the gate because the swerve is in the conception, not the means: in 1962 the idiom is Britten’s own, tonal at its centre, with the tritone its one structural gamble.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Change the form and the work loses what it knows. The three planes are the knowledge: the liturgy in full orchestra and chorus, public and ceremonial; the soldiers in a chamber group, close and speaking; the boys and organ at a distance, a rite going on elsewhere. They are kept apart because the work’s claim is that they do not hear one another, and they meet only in the Libera me, at the moment the two soldiers lie down to sleep. As a sequence of Owen songs the work would lose the rite it indicts; with Owen read between movements it would lose the contradiction made in the same bar, the boys’ Hostias against “half the seed”. Held below the top by the Dies irae, where the alternation becomes a pattern, and by the Sanctus, whose poem is placed more than required.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Evidence, not promise, over six decades: Mervyn Cooke’s Britten: War Requiem (Cambridge Music Handbooks, 1996); a large literature on Britten, pacifism and the Owen settings; the history of the Decca recording; Derek Jarman’s film; recordings and performances in every decade. The questions stay open: whether the ending consoles or ironises; whether the boys stand for innocence or for the indifference of ritual; what the bells mean at the last bar; whether the work is a Mass or an argument against one. What holds the axis at 8.5 is volume and span: the contest is real but still largely British, and it is sixty years old, not two centuries.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, and they part. The force is high. The work showed that a liturgical setting could be set against itself, and that a public commemoration could be a work of accusation and mourning at once. The reach is wide in presence and narrow in composition. Concert music of the 1960s was moved by Ligeti, Penderecki, Stockhausen, Berio and the minimalists, not by this work. It is the lowest Pressure on Tradition among the requiems on the desk, below Mozart’s at 8.8, Brahms’s at 8.6 and Verdi’s at 8.5. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the work made the modern commemorative oratorio, which interleaves liturgy with secular witness and is now a standard form for the anniversaries of war.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: published, performed and recorded in the version first given, with no textual doubt. Presence is continuous and wide for a work of its age: sung at anniversaries and in the ordinary concert season, in Britain, Germany and across the world, and recorded many times, first under Britten for Decca in 1963. Its span is 64 years. The surface fixed to its moment is real but light: a consecration of 1962, the casting of soloists from three nations once at war, the two world wars themselves. The text is not charged; Owen’s poems have survived a century. It is not the widest presence of its decade’s concert music, and it is held a tenth below the top of its step for that.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Command of the medium bears weight throughout. The setting of English is among the best of its century: Owen’s lines are declaimed at the pace of speech without losing their verse, and in “Strange Meeting” the tenor and baritone share a poem without becoming a duet. The orchestration keeps three bodies of sound distinct, and they remain audible in the full texture of the close. The tritone is used as harmony, as bell and as the pivot of the final cadence. The Offertorium fugue is built to be heard twice in two meanings; the ostinato of the Agnus Dei carries two texts at once. The costs: the Latin choral writing is in places conventional, and the fanfares and choral patterns of the Dies irae are repeated more than developed.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the brass fanfares of the Dies irae and “Let us sleep now”. One law governs them. Every element is either the rite or the witness, and every movement is the meeting or the failure to meet of the two, held over the unresolved interval of the bells. The fanfares are the rite’s terror, which the soldiers answer with “Bugles sang” and the artillery sonnet; the lullaby of the two dead men is the witness at rest, which the rite’s In paradisum at last joins. The Sanctus and the ostinato of the Agnus Dei obey the same law in other means. The strain is at the close: the law that the planes do not hear one another is suspended there, and the score does not settle whether that is its fulfilment or its relaxation.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The orders are many, and the three planes hold them together: consciousness, in the soldiers’ voices; war, as event and as institution; the state and its old men, in the parable; the sacred, as the whole liturgy and its failure; history, two world wars and a bombed cathedral, the second named by the occasion and the first by the poems; the family, in the father and the son; childhood, in the boys; the natural order, in the sun of “Futility” and the stars of “Bugles sang”; and the dead as a society. They are integrated, since the parable makes the family the state and the state the rite. What holds the axis at 8.5 is labour, which is absent, and the domestic, which appears only in glimpses.

Score: 8.5 / 10