A Singer’s Guide to the Great Composers: Britten Pt3
In 1962, the consecration took place of the new Coventry Cathedral, replacing the old one which had been destroyed in a German air raid on the 14th November 1940. The old bombed-out shell remained roofless, across the road from the new building designed by Basil Spence. It was both an architectural and a symbolic rebirth, and it was decided that Benjamin Britten, the foremost English composer of the time, should be commissioned to write a Requiem in its honour. Britten was the perfect choice for the commission, as he was famous as a pacifist and a conscientious objector, and to the authorities’ credit, he was given free rein in his composition.
He chose to set the words of the Latin Requiem for the dead, alongside nine poems by the war poet, Wilfred Owen, who had himself been killed one week before the end of the First World War in 1918. For the Latin words, Britten scored for soprano soloist, choir and full orchestra, and for the Owen poems, he scored for tenor and baritone soloists and chamber orchestra, the combined forces only joining in the last section. This concept was enormously complicated but renders the work even more unique and wonderful. As part of his reconciliatory concept, the soloists were to come from Britain, Russia and Germany, the three main combatants in the European conflict between 1939 and 1945. Since he was the most famous composer in the world at the time, Britten was able to engage three of the finest singers from those countries, namely Peter Pears, Galina Vishnevskaya and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Their participation made the resulting work even more important historically. As it happened, the Soviet authorities refused to allow Vishnevskaya to travel to Britain for the first performance, and she was replaced by Heather Harper, a wonderful English soprano, but Galina’s absence diluted the basic concept of the Requiem. She was able to take part in the Decca recording made by all the other original forces in 1963, and so was preserved her visceral and thrilling performance of the soprano part.
Benjamin Britten during War Requiem rehearsals in 1962 in Coventry Cathedral.
Britten dedicated the work to four men who had either been killed in the war or who had been severely affected by it, and it is clear that this piece was the most overt articulation of his deeply held beliefs in Pacifism, which had guided his whole life. Therefore, it is not only important as one of the greatest choral works of all time, but also as a significant statement, at a time of heightened tension between the two blocs of the Cold War, of the composer’s personal belief that war solves nothing, and that peace and love must prevail. On the title page of the Requiem, Britten quoted Wilfred Owen - “My Subject is War, and the Pity of War. The Poetry is in the Pity. All the Poet can do today is Warn!”
I had heard the War Requiem performed at the Edinburgh Festival, and had spoken to Vishnevskaya about it when I worked with her at Aldeburgh in the 80s, but had never given a moment’s thought to singing it, as it was written for Fischer-Dieskau, whose baritone voice was quite dissimilar to my own. However, when I was invited by the Chester Music Society Choir to take part in their performance of the War Requiem a few years ago, I took it to my singing teacher, Tony Roden, out of interest, and we discovered that, to the surprise and delight of both of us, apart from a couple of high notes which I might have to fudge, it was perfectly feasible for me to take on the contract. Particularly given my experience of singing song recitals over the course of my career, as well as my enthusiasm for operas where the words are as crucial as the music, it transpired that the War Requiem could become a piece especially suited to my style of singing, and so we embarked on learning it together. This was a real labour of love, as although it is difficult to sing I had performed enough Britten by this time, especially the almost contemporary ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, to find the idiom quite easy to grasp, and the learning process enjoyable. An optional lower note in the section, “Be slowly lifted up”, and a bit of floaty head voice in the final Requiem ‘Aeternam’, allowed me to reconcile my voice with the one written for by Britten, and, finally, I was able to take part in a hugely successful performance in Chester Cathedral.
The first performance in 1962 was further complicated by a shoulder problem experienced by the composer, which forced him to abandon his plan to conduct the whole complicated work on his own. Consequently, Meredith Davies conducted the main orchestra, while Britten confined himself to the chamber orchestra, an outcome not envisaged by the composer, but which actually worked quite well. Since then, conductors have had a choice as to how to conduct the piece.
The allocation of the original soloists permeated the composition process, as the soprano’s contribution is in a style very well suited to the dramatic and dynamic intensity of Galina Vishnevskaya, for whom Shostakovich had written many great works, and the more contemplative, reflective sections involving the two male soloists and the chamber orchestra, beautifully matching the skills of Pears and Fischer-Dieskau. It is amusing however, to hear, on the 1963 recording, the often-remarked heavy German accent of the baritone on some of the texts. This reflects something I noted in my series “A Singer’s Life”, when writing about singing in various languages, that because most German singers speak good idiomatic English, they often neglect to pay attention to the difficulties inherent in sung English. Poor Fischer-Dieskau had great problems singing the letter ‘L’, almost swallowing the consonant rather than lightly caressing it, but this is a minor caveat set against the expressive genius of this great singer. The poetic dialogues between the two singers is one of the wonders of the work, and the superb word painting by these two great artists on the original recording, set it aside as definitive.
The poetic imagination of Wilfred Owen, and the perfect musical expression created by Britten, are what make the War Requiem, for me, unique in all the composer’s works, and it is why I have devoted a whole article to it here.
From the first section, “What passing bells”, from the poem ‘Anthem for doomed Youth’, through the highly evocative “Bugles sang!” (“Beyoogels seng” a la DFD), and “We walked quite friendly up to death”, Britten set Owens’ words in a style which perfectly matched the doom-laden visions conjured up by the poet. Add in the fact that Britten and P ears were conscientious objectors, that Fischer-Dieskau was captured and imprisoned at the end of the Second World War, and that his handicapped brother had been sent to an institution and starved to death by the Nazi regime, and that Vishnevskaya had lived through the Nazi siege of Leningrad and suffered horrible privations, all of this contributed to the extraordinary power of Britten’s vision, and made it stand out for me as the greatest work of a very great composer.
The final section for the male soloists, after the searing ‘Libera Me’ of the soprano and full chorus, is a setting of Owen’s deeply troubling “Strange Meeting”. I extracted this part for a concert I gave in memory of the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War, in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2014, and I think it is worth looking at now in more depth.
It imagines a surreal meeting – a combatant slips away from a battle scene into a strange underworld, down some dull tunnel where silence reigns, apart from the moans of men. He knows it must be Hell’ or at least Purgatory’ (shades of the Lyke Wake Dirge). One of the moaners jumps up, and recognition dawns. “Strange Friend, here is no cause to mourn”, sings the tenor. “None” said the other, (replies the baritone). “Save the undone years, the hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours, was my life also…” “For by my glee, might many men have laughed, and of my weeping, something has been left, which must die now. I mean the truth untold. The pity of war, the pity war distilled.” This sentiment is itself a distillation of Britten’s profound belief in the futility of war, and, in this amazing passage of music, with absolutely minimal orchestral accompaniment, the baritone lays bare the utter, simple ghastliness with which war destroys the human soul. As I write these words, in May 2021, the Israelis and Palestinians are attacking each other once again, the outcome of which will surely be more misery and more bloodshed, and no reconciliation.
Further on in the passage, the protagonist continues, “Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot wheels, I would go up and wash them from sweet wells.
I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned yesterday through me, as you jabbed and killed! I parried, but my hands were loath and cold. Let us sleep now...” and so, the rest of the performers join in, in a great slow peroration to the end of the work, and we hear all three soloists and the chorus and both orchestras, as this most profound of works closes quietly, yet without closure.
It has been a great discovery for me, later in life, to find a piece of music which sums up my own feelings about the utter futility of war, the absolute folly of this way of settling disputes. While being deeply grateful to those whose sacrifices have allowed me to live a life largely free from fear of sudden death at the hands of fellow men, I hate to glorify the process that caused this sacrifice in the first place. Even though I am reasonably safe, I am reminded daily that, elsewhere in the world, millions are afraid of a visit in the night, the sudden explosion of a bomb, or the hatred of someone who looks different or speaks differently. We learn from the past, but history only tells us of our failures. Somehow, Benjamin Britten, that cold, often remote man who found it almost impossible to hold on to friends, but who has been adored for his compassionate music, filled with empathy and sympathy, somehow, Britten has been able, through his music, to show us a way forward to a better life, where the unconventional can live at ease with the conventional, and where goodness can prevail.
I am reminded of the late scene in ‘Billy Budd’, when Budd, the simple sailor, who had to be condemned for a crime which was not really a crime, by the man whom he revered above all others, cries out just before his execution, “Starry Vere, God bless you!” He thanks his captain for making a decision that destroys him but saves the crew. This compassion is clear throughout Britten’s work, and marks him out as a genius of the highest order.
