faithasawayoflife: Britten's War Requiem: Beauty and Terror

Last Saturday night, in Yale's Woolsey Hall, I attended a performance of Britten's massive and masterful War Requiem. It is, if you've never heard it, a piece that requires two orchestras, three soloists, and multiple choirs. I think they had 400 performers for this performance. I had been reading about it for weeks, listening to the famous 1960s recording on Decca performed by the London Symphony and directed by Britten himself. He wrote it for the consecration of Coventry Cathedral, destroyed by the Luftwaffe during World War II and rebuilt in the 1950s. The fact that the new cathedral was build next to the ruins of the old, intentionally left as a reminder of human horror, inspired Britten to take this opportunity to make a major anti-war statement. It is awesome, in the fullest sense of that overused term. Awful, at times, and yet so beautiful that one cannot look away. Near the end, an amazing climax when the voices come together in a haunting final section titled: "let us sleep now", I had the strangest feeling, one I've not had since I saw U2 in Boston two years ago when people walked out during the singing of the climax song, "40," which is a pretty amazing spiritual moment (the song is from Psalm 40.) Here are some thoughts, any way, on why this piece is so amazing.

1. Incredible imagination.
The War Requiem is masterfully simple, even as it is hugely complex. The basic idea of the piece, for those who don't know it, is to take an ancient form (the mass for the dead) and juxtapose it with the haunting war poems of Wilfred Owen. That simple juxtaposition works to mutually question the claims within each--in one, God's judgment and mercy, and the other, the god-forsaken horror of war. But it goes much deeper. I took along an amazing text to read before the concert by my doctoral mentor, Don Saliers, on "Beauty and Terror" in which he includes this reflection from Mary Mothersill so pertinent to this point: "all persons and some works of art--those to which we pay homage--have souls that are complex, multilayered, and partly hidden. They are not to be taken in at a glance, and long study leaves room for fresh discoveries." Such is the War Requiem.

2. Beauty and terror held together in a statement against war.
To expand on the complexity within a simple overall idea, while making more specific how Britten holds together beauty and terror, let me quote Don's description here of what is perhaps the most haunting section of the Requiem--Offertorium.

"At the point of the offertory, the music retells the story of Abram and Issac. 'So Abram arose, and clave the wood, and went, /And took [Issac] with him, and a knife.' The boy observes the preparations for the sacrifice and asks where the lamb for this offering is. 'Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,/And builded parapets and trenches there, /And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.' A musical shift interposes the voice of a divine messenger who bids Abram: 'Lay not thy hand upon the lad, Neither do anything to him. Behold, A ram...Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.' The baritone and tenor soloists are joined by a children’s choir. The children begin to sing the ancient Offertorium text from the Latin Mass (Hostias et preces tibit/ Domine laudis offerimus . . . . ['Sacrifices and prayers we offer, Lord, to you with praise...bring them from death to life']. Unlike the biblical ending of the story, there follows a terrifying text, sung by the two soloists: 'But the old man would not so, and slew his son,--And half the seed of Europe, one by one.' In Britten's musical intensification of the unspeakable, the phrase, 'one by one,' is repeated by both soloists in broken musical lines over the children’s prayers."

Britten uses the Children's choir, singing from another location than the main orchestra and soloists, to represent a kind of pure voice, both beautiful to tone and presenting the pious text of the requiem mass, where as the baritone and tenor soloists sing the riveting and horrifying poetry of Owen. The altered ending to the familiar biblical tale alone would only horrible, but it is set against the song of the children singing Hostias et preces &tc.

3. performance that cuts to the deepest level of human life.

In a sense, I've already pointed to his but it has a slightly different cast and that is that the address is so real because it hits our emotions, those things we care most about, and digs there. Saliers: "A person, a community, or a whole society is better known by what is admired, feared, loved, grieved over, and hoped for than through its propositionally stated ideas and beliefs." The first tenor solo begins this, just after the line "Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine"/ "Rest eternal grant to them, O Lord." It begins, "What passing bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles' rapid fire." The raw grief and terror portrayed in these poems set side by side with great claims of the faith cut deep, asking us what is true, what we feel in our gut, heart, soul.

4. people go for all sorts of reasons, and many don't get it.

Here, I just want to comment on how many people simply got up and left. They just don't get it, aren't drawn into it, don't submit to it in order to hear its message. They just got up and walked out, even just before and even during the incredibly powerful concluding piece, ""Sleep now." What are they thinking? It seems like the worst sort of American Individualism as if I'm just consuming this piece, and I'll take it if I like it, or if it fits my schedule, or if I'm not bored, and if something comes up, I'm out of here. I take this up in chapter seven of my new book Faith as a Way of Life and quote C. S. Lewis who says this about faith and art: : “The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)” (See An Experiment in Criticism, 19). Are we now so into ourselves that we can't actually surrender to anything? If that experience tells me anything, it was that things are getting worse--it was those 40 and younger who seems most free to get up and leave, doors banging, when ever they felt like it. It does some subtle violence to the performers, the performance, and to the individuals to simply walk out. Sure, somebody might have had an emergency come up, but not all of them . . .

Hope this was helpful to others; it was for me just a chance to really take what I'd heard and reflect on it, its power and majesty. If you want my reflections on how I compare it to a U2 show, go here.

anon, and peace