Walter Meyer:

>As I hear the Ninth, it's upbeat, optimistic, an eager anticipation of
>the better world that enlightenment will most certainly achieve for us;
>you might call it an "Ode to Joy"!
>
>I hear the War Requiem as a work describing a world that has fallen apart
>...The only peace the Boys' Choir, Chorus and Soprano, can hold out for
>us is the peace of the grave.

Fair enough, if you focus on the Ode to Joy section of the symphony, except
that I boggle at the "most certainly" part.  Optimism as an element of the
Enlightenment has been much overemphasized; just look at the raking Candide
gave that notion.  Beethoven was perhaps incurably committed to upbeat
outcomes, though he had to come back from the brink of suicide to achieve
this for himself, and in a work like the Hammerklavier the ending seems
more like a grim hanging on, to me.  In the Ninth he puts the listener
through the uncertainty of the opening movement, the perhaps near-forced
jollity of the second, the profound pathos of the adagio (if it's performed
right) and the uproar and rejected options that precede the "Nicht dieses
Toenes" (sp?) before the affirmation of joy and brotherhood of the Schiller
Ode.  What he seems to be saying is something like, "OK, folks, things
haven't been going too well, but it is up to us how we are going to proceed
from here.  How about this, for a change?"

Britten certainly gives us 20th Century despair about the Enlightenment
program.  WWI practically killed the Enlightenment, except that it has a
bit of Till Eulenspiegel persistence about it.  (Out of WWI came the League
of Nations, with all its idealism, however inadequate to the challenges
of the real world.) But some of the contrast you rightly point out would
emerge from the comparison of any classic symphony with almost any requiem.
The Berlioz Dies Irae is as harrowing as Britten's.  (Britten's conducting
of that part of his War Requiem is sensational, by the way.) And although
the Owen text may suggest only the peace of the grave, one cannot but infer
that he believed down to his toes that things should be otherwise, however
unlikely the prospects for this may seem.  The dead soldiers may be
brothers in death, but he sees them as brothers just the same, as Schiller
did.

Jim Tobin