A timeless expression of humane protest against the butchery of war, the War Requiem was commissioned for the consecration of the Cathedral of St. Michael at Coventry in 1962. The completion of this, the first modern cathedral in England for many years, drew intense national interest. It represented a kind of resurrection of the cathedral itself from the ashes of the medieval building which was almost totally destroyed during World War II. Britten offset the traditional Latin text with the poetry of Wilfred Owen, killed on the Western Front just before the Armistice. Of all the British soldier-poets of World War I, Owen most tersely and disturbingly stripped war of any sense of justice or glory. Owen had declared: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the Pity."
Inspired by the acoustical space in which the premiere was to take place, Britten conceived the War Requiem for three spatially and instrumentally differentiated groups, needing two conductors. As well as commenting on some of the great requiems of the past (particularly, in the "Dies irae", those of Mozart and Verdi,) the work draws together many elements of Britten's work from the preceding quarter-century.
