William Copper wrote:

>Jeff Dunn wrote:
>
>>my vote is for the War Requiem.  The shadow of WW1 still haunts us
>>today, and didn't even start to fade until 1989.  Once you list technology
>>and death as characteristics of the century, there isn't much left.
>
>I love much choral music, and have sung much, though never Britten's War
>Requiem, and I definitely focus on 20th century music -- but I have never
>found what exactly causes so many people to pick this piece above so many
>others as great or exemplary.  Can someone be specific about a movement or
>section that could get me hooked?

For starters, I think that the War Requiem reflects more forcefully than
any other musical work the composer's disgust and disillusionment at what
God or man permitted to occur during 1914-1918, in that most pointless
of all wars, which avenged almost no wrongs, prevented no oppressions,
ensured no peace, and eventually became the basis for the next world war,
sacrificing all too much of the seed of Europe, "one by one", in the
process.  I think Britten recognized the First World War as *the* obscene
atrocity of the twentieth century.  Unlike the Second World War, an
outgrowth of the first, in which there was a definable evil that had to
be defeated, the First World War was a pure exercise in national vanity,
on the altar of which scores of millions of people were doomed to die.
England and Germany had no real claims against each other.  And aside from
French revanchism, there was no basis for hostility between Germany and
France to warrant the snuffing out of so many young lives.  Nor did anybody
have any bone of contention with Russia.

The War Requiem, thus holds up the First World War as a rebuke to what
liked to consider itself civilized mankind.  It does so all the way
through, perhaps as dramatically as anywhere else, in the retelling of
the tale of Abraham and Isaac.  Only, when the tale was transferred from
Biblical parable to real life, Abraham, in the person of European leaders,
could not be prevailed upon to stay his hand from the slaughter of the
young boy.  So the parable is revised for modern consumption to have
Abraham kill his son "and half the seed of Europe, one by one" all against
the background of the traditional Latin text purporting to reassure us of
Michael, the holy standard-bearer leading the souls of the faithful into
the holy light as God had promised Abraham and his seed.

I hear the War Requiem as a work describing a world that has
fallen apart (just listen to the "Libera me" w/ its repeated "Dies Irae"
preceding the duo between the tenor and baritone!), where barbarism
triumphs over civilization, where Abraham gleefully consummates the
sacrifice that God had never intended him to perform, and in which death
alone can bring about reconciliation ("I am the enemy you killed, my
friend....Let us sleep now.") The only peace the Boys' Choir, Chorus
and Soprano, can hold out for us is the peace of the grave.

In passages like those described above, I think that Britten managed
with his music and choice of texts to convey, beyond mere reporting, the
total horror that blemished so much of the last century and has spilled
over into this one as well.  All that the world has suffered and the
resignation which is perhaps the only realistic substitute for misplaced
hope, are expressed in this music which depicts humanity's anguish without
robbing it of its dignity.

wm