The Composition
Britten's War Requiem was commissioned for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral and premiered on 30 May 1962 at the cathedral, conducted by Meredith Davies and the composer. The original cathedral had been destroyed by German bombing on 14-15 November 1940, and the new cathedral, designed by Basil Spence, was built alongside the preserved ruins as a statement of reconciliation. Britten conceived the War Requiem as an act of reconciliation across the enmities of the Second World War, deliberately casting a German baritone (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau), an English tenor (Peter Pears, Britten's partner), and a Russian soprano (Galina Vishnevskaya, though she was ultimately prevented from performing at the premiere by Soviet authorities) in a work that would acknowledge the shared humanity of those on all sides of the war.
The work runs approximately eighty-five minutes and is scored for three distinct performing forces: a full orchestra with soprano soloist and chorus (SATB plus children's chorus in the distance) for the Latin Requiem Mass texts; a chamber orchestra with tenor and baritone soloists for the Wilfred Owen war poems; and an organ for the children's chorus. The three forces interweave throughout the work, the Latin liturgy and the English poetry confronting each other directly, commenting on each other, and ultimately failing to resolve their mutual challenge.
Biblical Text
The Latin Requiem Mass text, as in Verdi's Requiem, draws on Daniel 12:2, Matthew 25:31-46, and Revelation 6 for the Dies irae sequence, and on Psalm 130 ('Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord') and other penitential texts for the Requiem aeternam and Lux aeterna. The central theological conflict of the work is between the Latin Mass's offer of eternal rest and salvation and the Owen poems' bitter denial that such consolation is available to those who have experienced the reality of industrialized warfare.
The most shattering moment of the entire work is Britten's setting of Owen's 'Parable of the Old Man and the Young,' which retells the Binding of Isaac from Genesis 22 but with a catastrophic reversal: when the Angel of the Lord stays Abraham's hand and offers him a ram to sacrifice instead of his son, Britten's Abraham refuses - 'But the old man would not so, but slew his son, and half the seed of Europe, one by one.' This setting of Genesis 22 is one of the most theologically devastating moments in twentieth-century music: the text that Christian tradition had always read as a type of divine mercy (God providing a substitute sacrifice) is reread by Owen and Britten as a parable of how every generation of political leaders sends its sons to die rather than accepting the alternative.
The Composer
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) was a committed pacifist, a conscientious objector who had spent part of the Second World War in the United States to avoid conscription, and a homosexual man who lived openly (if not publicly) with his partner Peter Pears at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. His outsider status gave him a particular perspective on the institutions - nation, church, war - that the War Requiem addresses, and his pacifism was not merely political but deeply personal and moral.
Britten had been planning a large-scale anti-war work for many years before the Coventry commission gave him both the occasion and the structural framework. His choice of Wilfred Owen's war poems was not incidental: Owen, who was killed in France one week before the Armistice in November 1918, was himself a poet of extraordinary moral seriousness who had written in the preface to his poems: 'My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity... All a poet can do today is warn.'
Musical Analysis
The War Requiem's musical language alternates between the traditional tonal idiom of the Requiem Mass - conservative harmonies, clear textural differentiation between chorus and orchestra - and the more astringent, dissonant idiom of the Owen settings, whose chamber orchestra uses polytonality, dissonant counterpoint, and tonal ambiguity to represent the fractured world of the trenches.
The opening Requiem aeternam is scored for full orchestra and chorus and establishes the tritone (the interval of an augmented fourth - historically called diabolus in musica, the devil in music) as the work's central harmonic tension: the interval between F and B, which appears in the opening bars, recurs throughout the entire work and is never fully resolved. This unresolved tritone enacts the work's central theological question: whether the promise of eternal rest (the Requiem text) can speak to the specific historical reality of industrialized slaughter (the Owen poems).
The Agnus Dei is the most musically radical moment: tenor and baritone soloists sing an Owen poem about the aftermath of a gas attack while the Latin Agnus Dei text is set simultaneously by the chorus in a different key. The two musical lines - and the two theological registers - coexist without merging, creating a dissonance that Britten refuses to resolve.
Theological Content
The War Requiem's theology is a theology of questioning, not of affirmation. Britten does not simply set the traditional Requiem texts as consolation and follow them with Owen's denial; rather, he allows the Owen poems to interrogate the Requiem texts from within, asking whether the promise of divine mercy is adequate to the reality of historical atrocity. The work ends with the two dead soldiers of the final Owen poem ('Strange Meeting' - a vision of enemy soldiers meeting in hell and recognizing their shared humanity) singing together 'Let us sleep now,' and the children's chorus intoning 'In paradisum deducant te Angeli' ('May the angels lead you into paradise'). Whether this ending is consolation, irony, or both is left to the listener.
Performance History
The premiere recording (Britten conducting, Decca, 1963) was released within weeks of the premiere and sold over 200,000 copies in its first year - an unprecedented commercial success for a new work of classical music. The War Requiem became the defining musical statement of post-war European guilt and the aspiration for reconciliation, and it has been performed at major commemorative events ever since, including the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme and multiple Holocaust memorial concerts.
Notable Recordings
Britten's own 1963 recording (with the original soloists: Vishnevskaya, Pears, Fischer-Dieskau; London Symphony Orchestra; Decca) is the primary reference. Subsequent significant recordings include those of Simon Rattle (Birmingham Symphony, 1983, EMI), Colin Davis (London Symphony, 1998, LSO Live), and Paavo Järvi (Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie, 2012).
Legacy
The War Requiem is athe supreme anti-war statement in the choral repertoire and one of the most discussed theological works of the twentieth century. Its challenge to the consolatory tradition of the Requiem Mass - embodied in its refusal to let the Owen poems be silenced by the Latin liturgy - made it a touchstone for subsequent discussions of how art should respond to historical atrocity. Its casting philosophy - deliberately international, crossing the lines of former enmity - established a model for cultural diplomacy through music that has been widely imitated. And its theological courage - the willingness to let genuine doubt and questioning stand alongside traditional faith - established it as one of the few sacred works of the modern era that speaks honestly to the experience of those for whom the promises of faith are genuinely contested.