James Tobin wrote:

>A further thought on this.  Britten wrote his Spring Symphony not
>that long after World War II and the War Requiem in the early 1960's.
>The Spring Symphony could arguably be called Britten's "ode to joy."
>Would the War Requiem "revoke" that?

Whatever my views of Britten's *War Requiem*, I certainly would not
characterize Britten's compositions generally as works of gloom and
despair.

Nevertheless, relistening to the *Spring Symphony* which I haven't heard
for years, I would hardly describe it as an "Ode to Joy", some of the
texts to the contrary notwithstanding.  Some of the music, especially the
introduction, sounds quite ominous, most of the rest, wistful.  I fail to
find any musical exuberance in the work that would evoke the last movement
of Beethoven's Ninth.  And so I probably would not view the *War Requiem*
as taking back the *Spring Symphony*.

The concept of revoking Beethoven's Ninth is not my own.  I read it
in Thomas Mann's *Doktor Faustus* after the passage describing the
excruciatingly painful death from meningits of the angelic little boy,
Nepomuk Schneidewein ("Echo").  The novel's composer protagonist, Adrian
Leverkuehn, says to Zeitblom, the novel's narrator:

   "....'I have discovered that it ought not be.'

   "'What ought not be, Adrian?'

   "'The good and the noble,' he replied, 'what people call human, even
   though it is good and noble.  What people have fought for, have
   stormed citadels for, and what people filled to overflowing have
   announced with jubilation--it ought not be.  It will be taken back.
   I shall take it back.'

   "'I don't quite understand, my dear fellow.  What do you want to take
   back?'

   "'The Ninth Symphony,' he replied...."

The following chapter then describes Leverkuehn's last composition, the
symphonic cantata, *The Lamentation of Dr. Faustus*.  (I do not mean to
suggest that the fictional work of music here anticipates Britten's *War
Requiem*, which Mann's *Doktor Faustus* predates.  And I give Britten too
much credit for having in any way "tracked" his *War Requiem* to Mann's
description.  It's simply that, having grown up through the middle of this
century, and having at the time of its first publication, read Mann's novel
allegorizing the moral and physical collapse of a Germany for which one
could have predicted better things, the idea of pulling back Beethoven's
Ninth had a fascination for me.  When, many years later, I first heard
Britten's *War Requiem* I could not help remembering what I had read in
Mann's novel, and I'm taking the liberty of posting here parts of the
description of what the narrator of the novel felt was the protagonist's
promise of a rescission of the *Ode to Joy*)

   "....I was near him and near the creation of a work loved despite
   pain and shudders, a work that has lain there for a decade and a
   half, a dead, banned, concealed treasure, whose revival may at last
   be brought about by the destructive liberation [of Germany at the
   end of the Second World War] we now endure.  There were years when
   we children of the dungeon dreamt of a song of joy--*Fidelio*, the
   Ninth Symphony--with which to celebrate Germany's liberation, its
   liberation of itself.  But now only this work can be of any use, and
   it will be sung from our soul:  the...most awful lament of man and
   God ever intoned on this earth....

   "A lament, a wailing!  A *de profundis* that with fond fervor I can
   say has no parallel....

   "....The lament, you see--and we are dealing here with a constant,
   inexhaustibly heightened lament, accompanied by the most painful
   *Ecce homo* gestures--the lament is expression *per se*, one might
   boldly say that all expression is in fact lament, just as at the
   beginning of its modern history, at the very moment it understands
   itself as expression, music becomes a lament, a *"Lasciatemi morire,"*
   the lament of Aridne, softly echoed in the plaintive song of the
   nymphs.  It is not without good reason that the *Faustus* cantata is
   stylistically linked so strongly to Monteverdi and the seventeenth
   century, whose music--again not without good reason--favored echo
   effects, at times to the point of mannerism.  The echo, the sound of
   the human voice returned as a sound of nature, revealed as a sound
   of nature, is in essence a lament, nature's melancholy 'Ah, yes!' to
   man, her attempt to proclaim his solitude, just as vice versa, the
   nymphs' lament is, for its part, related to the echo.  In Leverkuehn's
   final and loftiest creation, however, echo, that favorite device of
   the baroque, is frequently employed to unutterably mournful effect.
   [A reminder to the reader again:  "Echo" was how the little boy,
   Nepomuk, had called himself.]

   ....

   "Now, in my attempt to present some idea of Leverkuehn's apocalyptic
   oratorio, did I not refer to the substantial identity of what is most
   blessed and most heinous, to the inner sameness of its children's
   angelic chorus and hell's laughter? To the mystic horror of those
   who can hear it, what is realized there is a formal utopia of terrifying
   ingenuity, which now becomes universal in the *Faust* cantata, taking
   possession of the entire work and allowing it, if I may put it that
   way, to be toatally consumed by its thematic element.  This gigantic
   *lamento* (lasting approximately an hour and a quarter) is, properly
   speaking, undynamic, lacking development and without drama, in much
   the same way as when a stone is cast into water the concentric circles
   that spread farther and farther, one around the other, are without
   drama and always the same.  A single immense variation on lamentation
   (and as such, negatively related to the finale of the Ninth Symphony
   with its variations on jubilation), it expands in rings, each inexorably
   drawing the others after it:  movements, grand variations, which
   correspond to textual units or chapters in the book and yet in and
   of themselves are once again nothing but sequences of variations.
   All of them refer back, as if to the theme, to a highly plastic basic
   figure of notes inspired by a particular passage of the text.

   ....

   "....'Ah, it ought not be!'--how those words stand almost like an
   instruction, a musical direction set above the choral and instrumental
   movements of *The Lamentation of Dr.  Faustus* and contained within
   every measure and cadence of this 'Ode to Sorrow'!  There is no doubt
   that he wrote it with an eye to Beethoven's Ninth, as its counterpart
   in the most melancholy sense of the word.  But it is not merely that
   more than once it performs a formal negation of the Ninth, takes it
   back into the negative, but in so doing it is also a negation of the
   religious--by which I cannot mean, its denial.  A work dealing with
   the Tempter, with apostasy, with damnation--how can it be anything
   but a religious work!  What I mean is an inversion, an austere and
   proud upending of meaning, such as I at least find, for example, in
   the 'friendly appeal' by Dr.  Faustus to the companions of his final
   hour that they should go to bed, sleep in peace, and be not
   troubled....[O]ne can scarcely help viewingt his as the conscious
   and deliberate reversal of the 'Watch with me!' of Gethsemane....

   "But yet another final, truly final reversal of meaning must be
   recalled here, must be pondered with the heart, a reversal that comes
   at the end of this work of endless lament and that, surpassing all
   reason, softly touches the emotions with that spoken unspokenness
   given to music alone.  I mean the cantata's last orchestral movement,
   in which the chorus loses itself and which sounds like the lament of
   God for the lost state of His world, like the Creator's sorrowful 'I
   did not will this.'....Just listen to the ending, listen with me:
   One instrumental after the other steps back, and what remains as the
   work fades away is the high G of a cello, the final word, the final
   sound, floating off, slowly vanishing in a *pianissimo* fermata*.
   Then nothing more.  Silence and night.  But the tone, which is no
   more, for which, as it hangs there vibrating in the silence, only
   the soul still listens, and which was the dying note of sorrow--is
   no longer that, its meaning changes, it stands as a light in the
   night."

I clearly lack the knowledge, and more importantly the skill to write
of an actual composition like Britten's *War Requiem* as Mann wrote about
a fictitious one.  And I have no intention of fitting Britten's work into
a procrustean bed by analogizing sections of his Requiem to described
portions of Leverkuehn's Cantata.  I felt justified, however, in
reproducing the above passages here because they evoked the same
impressions in me that hearing Britten's *War Requiem* for the first
time did many years later.

All of the quotations from Mann's novel are from the recent John E. Woods
translation.

Walter Meyer