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Britten - War Requiem

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Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem" is one of the most well-known choral works to emerge from Britain in this last century, although it is not a true Requiem in that it combines the Latin Mass for the Dead with excerpts from the celebrated poetry of the tragic First World War victim Wilfred Owen. The texts go hand in hand throughout the piece, and through his music Britten touches a nerve like no other composer - he captures in great profundity the horrors of war, both subtle and gross.

There are many fine recordings of the work available, but this one is simply beyond comparison. The finest musicians of the day are guided fastidiously through the challenging score by Britten himself. What results is a powerful rendition, chilling and moving in all the right ways. I must single out one moment in particular: the "Agnus Dei," which sets a sorrowful ground bass-like figure underneath a melting tenor solo (using as text the poem "One ever hangs"). The orchestra and choir are magically soft throughout this track, but more magical still is the incomparable singing of Peter Pears. It is one of those rare moments in which tears and heart-warming joy can freely mingle, and only a stony heart would not feel such emotions upon listening to it.

This release is made all the more remarkable for the inclusion of a "making-of" section, in the form of several tracks taped during the rehearsal sessions. This is a wonderful and rare opportunity to hear Britten's voice: he gives out explicit instructions, and comes across as insistent and stern (but still capable of making the odd joke!). Apparently, when Britten found out about it he was not best pleased and I doubt that he would approve of the release of this material if he were alive today. Nonetheless, whilst he was often making recordings of other music, he rarely recorded his own, and ultimately it was a fine decision of the producer to capture this piece of work in progress. There is a saying that composers are not always the best interpreters of their own music; from this recording, it's clear that such an adage did not apply to Benjamin Britten. Despite all this, I believe that whether or not you want to listen to it is up to you - in a way, some of the thrill and magic is taken out of the main recording if you listen to it as it was in preparation.

In any case, whether you seek an introduction to this landmark composition or are looking for a good rendition on CD, this version is the only one to go for, in my honest opinion. And thanks to Decca's best available technology, the sound quality is astonishingly pristine.

This is most definitely essential listening...

As a poet and Veteran of the conflict in Vietnam,I was interested in the war poems of Wilfred Owen, a poet of WWI who was killed just a few days before the end of that war. Owen's poems moved me to tears and utter silence. Then I listened to War Requiem by Britten and Owen's poetry soared to new heights. The orginal recording on CD seems the best of many good versions. It is pretty hard to go wrong with this material. The raging passions of war are evoked, the brutality and madness, the noise, the smoke, the horror, and the searching for a way to make meaning out of chaos, a way to make friends of all enemies. That Britten was a conscientious objector during WWII comes as no surprise. There is only so much that can be expressed by words or music about what war does to the body, to the soul, and Britten comes so close to that expression, with music that augments the Owen poetry of despair and of hope, that somehow through a process we hardly have a name for, we will fight no more. Anyone feeling that war is glamorous and noble should listen to Britten's War Requiem;maybe they won't change their minds about conflict with their fellow human beings, but just maybe they might have second thoughts, that every life is precious, that we, as a global community, have more in common than differences. After each listening of this CD, I am stunned to silence. There is Britten's and Owen's Visions, and I am left with hope that we may live in peace.

This was the piece of music that first really turned me on to classical music, listening to the very first performance from Coventry Cathedral on a small tranny radio. What I failed to realise then was that this massive impact was achieved by brilliant structural simplicity.

The whole work is effectively a study on the tritone, the 'diabolus in musica', that most disturbing and unstable of intervals. From the bells at the start to the harmonically ambiguous endings of the first and second movements and of the entire work; from the alternating tonics of the boys' Te Decet Hymnus to the alternating tintinnabulations of the soprano's Sanctus; from the fanfares of the Dies Irae to the two halves of the tenor's ineffable Dona Nobis Pacem at the end of the Agnus Dei. All these and countless other examples revolve around or grow out of the tritone. And what better musical image for war could there be than those two most irreconcilable notes in the scale?

Then, of course, there is the inspired concept of juxtaposing the hieratic incantations of the Latin Mass for the Dead with the burning anger of Wilfred Owen's First World War poems. There are, in fact, three tiers of performers in the War Requiem - the boys' choir and chamber organ, objective and dissociated in the distance; the soprano, chorus and orchestra singing the Latin Mass at, as it were, the centre of things; and the tenor and baritone with the chamber orchestra delivering Owen's bitter poems in the intimate and confidential foreground. The different perspectives of these three groups are a vital aspect of any performance and are ideally realised by producer, John Culshaw (of Golden Ring fame) and his team on this premiere recording.

After that first performance and subsequent ones in London, this recording was awaited with great anticipation. But even the most optimistic marketing man at Decca wasn't prepared for the overnight success of the enterprise. Classical music albums - especially of new music - weren't supposed to sell like that. From the iconic (and, at the time, unique) simplicity of the cover to the superlative standard of the recorded sound, never mind the quality of the performance itself, it outstripped the highest expectations.

And what of this performance? These were the performers for whom the piece was written - from the three soloists (specifically, a Russian, an Englishman and a German) to the inimitable Jimmy Blades in the chamber orchestra's percussion department. Famously, the Soviet Minster of Culture prevented Vishnevskaya from performing at the premiere and Heather Harper had to stand in and learn her part in just 10 days. By the time she recorded the part, her voice was not what it was in 1962. The purity of tone and the anguished commitment of her singing at moments like the Lacrymosa that one remembers from those first performances are very different from the more distanced interpretation with a touch of Slavic wobble that we get from Vishnevskaya. Different, but not necessarily better or worse. Pears and Fischer-Dieskau are, dare I say, peerless. Glorious singing from both: human, bitter, angry, touching, heartbreaking (Move Him into the Sun), heart-restoring as they duet the two dead enemies of Strange Meeting to sleep. The touch of a German accent in Fischer-Dieskau's otherwise immaculate English puts a new perspective on many of the poems that fall to his part (not just Strange Meeting) - but, after all, the Germans must have shared all the same feelings that Owen expressed so poignantly in his poetry.

As for Britten's control over all these forces (the first time, I think, that he hadn't shared the conducting, usually with Meredith Davies), it is as masterly as you would expect from the creator of it all - and one who was an illuminating conductor, too, both in his own and in others' music.

There have been many other recordings since this one. Some may have matched it in some departments some of the time. None can touch it for its inspired expression of a masterpiece, fresh from the making.

Funny, this performance and recording and piece actually seem to get better as the years go by. I first heard this recording barely 5 years after it was released. It was a new work then and it was treated pretty harshly by the more "progressive" elements of that awful decade, people (we have since learned through sad experience) who pulled a lot down but didn't have much to offer to replace any of it with. As the music of the last century sorts itself out we see who the real winners were: composers like Britten and Shostakovich, ones who could speak clearly to all with originality and genius, and even composers like Ives and Messiaen, who could use the most modern language to convey the sublime, instead of the unintelligible, or Ligeti, who could portray the ridiculous brilliantly.

This is quite a piece of music, this War Requiem of Britten's. This particular recording outshines all others and we're lucky to have it, lucky that it was engineered by the London/Decca people who seemed to miraculously provide better stereo sound than I even hear today (maybe just a prejudice). More than anything we're lucky to have a sizable batch of these recordings with Britten himself conducting. When you really think of it, having one of the great composers of the last century, who was incidentally a great conductor to boot, conduct his own works and having them recorded magnificently...well, it has to be about one of the finest treasures of the Twentieth Century.

Others wll try, a number have already, and we'll see new War Requiem recordings with all the sound engineering bells and whistles, star soloists, and name conductors I'm sure--whatever a name conductor is these days. But none will be of these people, that soon after the end of the Second World War, led by the composer himself. Just half kidding but this might be the only case where a moritorium on new recordings of a work might be a good idea. Let's just live with this one and be thankful.

As the armed forces of the United States struggles in Iraq, this work of genius should be re-discovered. I agree with all the other reviewers who speak of Britten's considerable musical talent. But I wish to comment on the fact that this work is a collaboration between a living composer and a deceased poet. Benjamin Britten selected 9 angry war poems by Wilfred Owen, and integrated these poems into the Latin Mass for the Dead. The poems are strategically integrated with both the instrumentation and the Latin mass.

When we hear "What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?" we know we are in for some confrontational lyrics and music.

Britten is masterful in bringing to life the personification of Death in the passages "Out there, we've walked quite friendly up to Death...We've sniff'd the green thick odour of his breath...He's spat at us with bullets and he's coughed schrapnel. We chorused when he sang aloft...We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe."

The terrible majesty of a war machine is captured in the music and poetry in the passages: "Be slowly lifted up thus long black arm. Great gun towering toward Heaven, about to curse, reach at that arrogance which needs thy harm and beat it down before its sins grow worse; but when thy spell be cast complete and whole, may God curse thee and cut thee from our soul."

The sense of tragedy increases in the music and lyrics as we hear about a man, drifting in and out of consciousness on the journey to become a corpse: "Move him, move him into the sun - gently its touch awoke him once. At home, whisp'ring of fields unsown, always it woke him, woke him even in France."

And then we come to Owen's masterpiece: "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, Issac 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 stretched forth the knife to slay his son. When lo! An Angel called out of heaven, saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad! Neither do anything to him. Behold, a ram caught in a thickett 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, and half the seed of Europe, one by one."

If you read the lyrics while listening, you may find, like me, that this degree of tragic stupidity and needless horror is difficult to fully absorb. Britten had to collaborate with a deceased but still angry vibrant voice in this poem by Wilfred Owen. The music must allow the pain and sadness and bitter irony of the poem to remain intact - which it does - certainly revealing Britten's considerable genius.

But Britten does not leave us in this state, but moves toward resolution, not only in the musical composition and the mass, but also in the final poem where a soul meets a soul with "I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and cold, Let us sleep now."

Enough said. Go listen.

As I write this, I am listening to this recording on WHRB, the invaluable Harvard radio station, one of the few that still plays music like this. I first heard the War Requiem when I was a young man, and I didn't get it. I really haven't heard it since, incredibly, since I love Britten's music. The experience is just overwhelming.

I want to thank the other reviewers, who have spoken far more eloquently than I possibly could about what this music meant to them.

Needless to say, my next act is to buy the recording.

Of all the Requiem Masses written in the last millenium, this one is, sadly, one of the least performed, and it is one of the greatest. It both ennobles (which any great piece should) and, brilliantly and very effectively, evokes its own theme, listed in the title.

When listening to this piece (and this recording is still the best of this work), one is transformed and sees oneself in all the spectrum of existence and non-existence. War and Hate are compared excellently (and frighteningly) with Peace and Love.

I had the pleasure of performing this piece several years ago, and the experience is still with me today. Of all the many Requiems I have performed (this includes the Mozart), this is the only one about which I can honestly say that.

The editorial review is actually incorrect. Benjamin Britten originally composed his War Requiem with Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya in mind for the Latin Mass portion. However, Vishnevskaya was not available for the first performance and had to be replaced by Heather Harper, so technically the Requiem was not premiered by "ambassadors" of each of the three countries represented in the War. The error nonwithstanding, Britten's War Requiem is one of the most awe-inspiring choral works that I have ever heard on CD. I had the privilege of studying the piece in a music history class which allotted copies of the score, and it amazing to look at the number of completely independent melodic lines functioning within a surprisingly succinct piece. When the Requiem ended, I found myself unable to move from my seat. I remained at my desk in complete awe until it suddenly dawned on me that I was going to be late for my next class. The piece transformed me. It brought me to a place that I never thought possible in the context of a classroom.

Britten's War Requiem is a monumental modernist statement and a truly impressive work, and this recording (his own) does it justice and then some. I would unhesitatingly recommend this recording for any who enjoy Britten's works. The orchestration, as might be expected from the work's composer, is absolutely stunning, and the playing brilliant. Pears sings with such rich tone and power as to rattle your bookshelves. The others singers and the chorus are excellent, though at times Britten lets the chorus slip almost entirely into the background, when a bit more focus might have been beneficial. However, it's hard to argue with the composer on a point of preference like that.
Requiem Masses always have immense potential to be very powerful works whether because of their connotation or simply the tradition of the medium. Britten's is no disappointment here. One of the most notable features of this recording is its overwhelming power, especially as the work progresses. It is difficult not to be affected by that kind of focused musical emotion.
Two warnings: one about the piece, the second about the recording. Do not expect to fall in love with this piece after the first few tracks, or even perhaps the first few listens. Hang in there, trust Britten, and he will undoubtedly impress you. As to this recording I will first say that it is by far the best I've heard of this piece, for all of the reasons mentioned above. The one problem I have is with Vishnievskaya. Her voice is amazing, beautiful, full-timbered, emotional, but... her diction, especially on this Latin text, is absolutely appalling. Beware, if diction is important to you, you may be turned off by her voice. But my advice is: ignore it. Don't let a minor quibble ruin your enjoyment of this magnificent recording.

If music hath charms to sooth the savage beast, then War Requiem, in it's compelling splendor and gravity surpasses mere music by several orders of magnitude.

The performance of Britten's score, imaginative and persuasive in its complexity, augmented by the powerful presentation of the Missa pro defunctis (The Mass for the Dead, or Requiem) and the poetry of Wilfred Owen, moves the spirit to profound ecstasies.

Immerse yourself in the experience. You'll never be the same again.