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