War Requiem in Wellington - and a Love Letter to Naxos
Tomorrow, I will fly to Aotearoa-New Zealand to perform Britten’s War Requiem (1962) alongside fellow soloists Morag Atchison and Benson Wilson, with Orchestra Wellington and the Orpheus Choir, under the baton of Maestro Marc Taddei. It’s a dream come true to perform this work, which first blew my tiny mind when I was a teenager. The War Requiem, which features several poems by Wilfred Owen, has been hugely influential in my journey with both classical music and poetry. It was my first exposure to “modern” classical music, and the first time I was deeply moved by truly heart-rending poetry. The extremes of expression created by Britten and Owen were electrifying to my young soul.
I first encountered the War Requiem when I was 14 years old. My friend George and I had become obsessed with Mozart’s Requiem – not only the music, with its wild fugues and hectic Dies irae, but also the strange mystic imagery of death and resurrection from the Book of Revelation. With our fascination piqued, we went on the hunt for more requiems to listen to, using the only method possible for us in the early 2000s – trawling the Naxos bargain bins at music stores like Sanity or JB Hifi.
For younger readers, let me just say that Naxos recordings were a lifeline for young musicians and music lovers in the 90s and 2000s. The company made recordings of lesser-known orchestras, soloists and conductors, which meant they were able to keep CD prices low. This was a terrific way for young people (subsisting on pocket money and part time jobs) to access some of the greatest music ever written for less than $5 an album. Many musicians of that era feel a deep gratitude towards this company!
So, one fateful day, I fished out from a Naxos bargain bin the 1995 recording of War Requiem, with Martyn Brabbins conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. From the ghostly, almost disembodied opening chorus of Requiem aeternum to the terrifying and majestic brass in the Dies irae, I was completely drawn in, and utterly thrilled.
I was transfixed by the ‘modernist’ elements of Britten’s composition – the deeply unsettling dissonances, like the recurring C-F# tritone throughout the work. The weird, shrill piccolo lines, like whistling artillery shells, and the bass drum thumps of explosions and terror. It opened my ears to a world of music where such outright extremes of expression were possible. It cracked open the nutshell limits of my childhood classical music exposure, which had been confined to the usual white bread canon of the 18th and 19th centuries. It showed my young mind that music doesn’t have to be ‘pleasant’ to be powerful, or ‘nice’ to be thrilling. There can be a terrible beauty in the distillation of the horror of war, that honours those who endured it, and who continue to endure it around the world.
And then there was poetry. My word.
In War Requiem, Britten ingeniously weaves several poems by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) throughout the Latin text of the requiem mass. Owen’s poetry chiefly focusses on his experiences during the First World War. The thematic resonances between the requiem mass and the poems are desperately moving. Their interweaving highlights, as Owen put it, “the pity of war”. One of these poems was the first piece of poetry that truly shook me to my core. In many ways, this was the spark for my love of the artform. It is called Futility, and is featured in the Dies irae movement of the requiem, interwoven with the Lacrimosa (day of tears).
Futility, by Wilfred Owen (May 1918)
Move him into the sun –
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds –
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?
Owen was killed in action on November 4, 1918 – exactly one week before the war ended.
The premiere performance of War Requiem took place in Coventry in 1962, to consecrate the rebuilt cathedral, which had been destroyed by German bombs during the Second World War. My grandmother, Phyllis Todd, lived in Coventry during the war and, mercifully, survived the blitz, though she carried mental scars all her life.
For the premiere performance, three soloists were chosen from Britain, Germany and Russia, as a symbol of peace and unity after Europe had torn itself apart twice in half a century. They were the British tenor Peter Pears, German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. Unfortunately, Soviet authorities denied Vishnevskaya a visa several days before the premiere, leaving her part to be performed by British soprano Heather Harper. However, Vishnevskaya was granted permission to travel to the UK to make the first recording of the work in 1963.
Given current global conflicts (including in Europe yet again), Britten and Owen’s powerful work is more relevant than ever. In the poet’s own words, quoted on the title page of the score:
My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity…
All a poet can do today is warn.
A Modern Hero, featuring Britten’s War Requiem and Eve Decastro-Robinson’s An Hour of Lead will be performed at the Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington on Saturday December 7, at 7.30pm. Tickets available here.
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