This week’s theme is…Them’s fightin’ words! Since time immemorial humans have found reasons to fight one another. The images of combat and war fill our stories, our art, and yes, our music. This week we listen to music colored by the din of combat.
Them’s fightin’ words!, Day 3 – Offertorium from War Requiem by Benjamin Britten
In the late 1860s the always uncompromising and ever inventive Johannes Brahms did something rather unconventional. He aimed to write a requiem, but didn’t want do it in the typical way and, therefore, set something of a precedent. Today, we might call someone like Brahms “spiritual but not religious”, which is to say he was strongly aware of some source of spiritual unity and supreme love in the universe (not to dwell on this), but pursued and communed with it in an unconventional way. Biographers have described his views as agnostic and even what we know today as humanistic. He was born into a Lutheran family, and the theology and worship practices he must have experienced certainly gave him a treasury of spiritual language and memory, but he followed his own path with that kind of thing. His mentee, Antonin Dvorak, a devout Catholic, (see this post), once said “Such a fine man, such a fine soul – and he believes in nothing! He believes in nothing!” Clearly this approach to the spirit was surprising and new to many, as was the profound artistic fruit that seemed to flow from it.
In spite of Brahms’ spiritual ambiguity, religious influences did find their way into his music. The most famous example of this is his extraordinary Requiem. It is called A German Requiem, which speaks to a plainly self-conscious break with the traditional setting of the Requiem Mass. And it is more his ambiguous spirituality than any sectarian religious agenda that motivated it, I would think. There are examples of Lutheran composers setting Catholic texts, for example the great Mass in B minor by J.S. Bach (not that he was crazy about Catholicism – his son Johann Christian’s conversion from Lutheranism to Catholicism caused him grief – it was essentially to win favor with a Catholic patron) and the abundant settings of Latin psalmody by Handel from his time in Italy during the first decade of the 1700s. Brahms could have set the traditional Latin Requiem text had he wanted to, so the choice to compile his own collection of texts from the Bible and set them to music in German speaks to an almost maverick New Age sensibility, a very deliberate break with traditions of all kinds, but a drive to maintain the themes which animate them. If you have never listened to Brahms’ German Requiem you definitely should. Its succession of seven noble movements, unified by an exploration of the process of loss and grief, speaks to the heart, and even speaks the transcendent language of religious devotion convincingly, to this day beloved by listeners of many different religious outlooks and philosophies. It could as easily be labelled A Human Requiem, so universal is its manner of comfort and speculation about the metaphysics of the cosmos.
Brahms’ German Requiem has come to be called a “non-liturgical” Requiem and was the first notable example. Another famous one came three quarters of a century later from Great Britain’s greatest musical figure of the twentieth century, Benjamin Britten. Spiritually, parallels can be drawn between Brahms and Britten. Where Brahms was raised Lutheran, Britten was raised in the dominant sect of his nation, the Church of England. While he remained somewhat connected to the faith throughout his life, the actual definition of his personal doctrine is difficult to discern. He was by no means a regular churchgoer, and his homosexuality may have put him at odds with the establishment. Like Brahms, he wrote a Requiem that takes liberties with the liturgy, but in a different way than that of his predecessor.
In 1962 the cathedral church at Coventry in England was consecrated, finally rebuilt after the original fourteenth century structure had fallen to the German Blitz in the Second World War. For the occasion, Britten was commissioned to contribute a significant musical work and, like Brahms, he chose to compose a Requiem. Unlike Brahms, he chose to set the Latin Requiem text. If you lay Britten’s Requiem side by side with that of Verdi, Berlioz (see this post), or Mozart, you will find all of the same parts. But Britten gives us a bonus, a twist. In between the segments of the Requiem text, Britten interspersed poems by Wilfred Owen.
Coventry Cathedral was destroyed in World War II, but Wilfred Owen is a notable figure of the First World War. A British Soldier who served from 1916 until just before the war’s end in 1918 (he was killed in action a short week before the armistice), Owen channeled his traumatic experiences into eloquent poems filled with graphic images and an ironical tone. The First World War was really a threshold between world orders, the old monarchies crumbling in its destructive wake, and with them the old-fashioned sense of the glory of war and dying for one’s monarch. Owen’s poetry reflects this massive societal shift, both in the brutal images he unreservedly described and also for the borderline sarcastic commentary his poetry speaks about the futility and tragedy of war, wielded all too lightly by those insulated by wealth and power. To get a taste of Owen’s poetic genius and his unflinching descriptions of the hell that is war, watch this documentary, The Great War and Shaping of the Twentieth Century, and scroll to 33:30 to hear Owen’s poem Dulce et decorum est in conjunction with a description of the awful poison gas introduced to warfare by the German army:
That documentary includes the last two thirds of the poem. If you want to read the complete text of Dulce et dcorum est, you can do so here.
In Owen’s commentary, Britten found an ideal voice with which to express his pacifistic sympathies. There is no glory of war here, no matter what message the mighty and powerful might broadcast, only immense suffering on the part of those who fight on their behalf. Britten weaves Owen’s poetry together with the Latin Requiem text seamlessly, clothing all of it in his vivid and eclectic musical voice. Over the course of his Requiem, Britten incorporates nine complete poems of Wilfred Owen, all dealing with the First World War. You can hear how he does this in the Offertorium segment of the Requiem. The Offertorium includes Domine Jesu, Sed signifer sanctus, Quam olim Abrahae, and Hostias in its traditional setting. But amidst that, Britten includes an incredibly strong, almost cynical, poem by Owen, called The Parable of The Old Men and The Young. In this poem Owen uses the story of the binding of Isaac, in which Abraham prepares to sacrifice his cherished only son as a burnt offering, as a biting parable which touches on themes of generational inequality, class struggle, and the foolish, prideful honor surrounding the waging of the futile Great War:
| Parable of the Old Man and the Young
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went, And took the fire with him, and a knife. And as they sojourned both of them together, Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father, Behold the preparations, fire and iron, But where the lamb for this burnt-offering? Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps, and builded parapets and trenches there, And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son. When lo! an angel called him out of heaven, Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad, Neither do anything to him. Behold, A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns; Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him. But the old man would not so, but slew his son, And half the seed of Europe, one by one. |
Britten’s placement of Owen’s poem within the flow of the Latin Requiem s impeccable, following as it does Quam olim Abrahae, which reflects upon the promise made by God to Abraham’s descendants. After the highly active setting of the Latin text for the whole choir, the tenor and baritone soloists continue in the same rhythmic character with the text of the poem. The climax of the poem is inspired as Britten illustrates the angel imploring Abraham to stay his hand, and then his (or the monarchies’) frightful decision to proceed with the sacrifice anyway. As this is done, the childrens’ choir interjects with Hostias – “Sacrifices and praise we offer to you, O Lord”. For both Owen and Britten, the idol of war is honor, and perhaps the old world order. This minute of music is packed with symbolism and moralizing.
The text of the Requiem Mass is ancient (see this post), and traditional settings of the text by composers like Mozart, Verdi, and Faure are beloved for their imagination and individuality according to their unique creative voices. In the hands of less orthodox composers (although Verdi was hardly orthodox) the text has served as inspiration for imaginative statements of a different kind, not so bound to tradition. For Brahms and Britten, the idea of the Requiem was a beginning, a point from which to jump and comment with a strong, compassionate voice, on the human condition, free from the constraints of the pure text. Stunning, moving, and thought-provoking art is waiting to be found in such places.
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