Music and the pity of war

“My subject is War, and the pity of War”, wrote Wilfred Owen. “The Poetry is in the pity.” Since his death in 1918, Owen has become this country’s prime war poet. In the cultural conceptions of the First World War, it is the mockery and brutality of Owen’s verse which has implanted itself in a nation’s consciousness, much more than any edicts of Lord Kitchener or orders of Douglas Haig. We scorn the “old lie” of Dulce et decorum est and the “ecstasy of fumbling” much more than we do the Prime Minister, Asquith, or the shell shortage which brought down his government. George Orwell wrote that the British had something of a fetish for disaster: we remember the Somme, Passchendaele, Ypres and Gallipoli. No one ever hears about the incredible “Hundred Days’ Offensive”, the Battle of Amiens and the swift end of the Great War. We crave the images of the heroic defeat at Dunkirk, the valiant slaughter of the Charge of the Light Brigade.

Wilfred Owen was not a pacifist. He believed in justified defensive wars — precisely the kinds of wars the British thought they were fighting in 1914 and 1939, and volunteered for service in 1915. His poetry is most fiercely directed at the greying officials and the politicians who sent the youth of their country to die for the sake of the “balance of power”, “imperial preference” and “God and King”. It was the ultimate futility of the war he was most shocked by, the sheer scale and number of the lines of marching men triumphantly tricked into such a torment.

A century later, Owen’s poetry is used by us as a reminder of that past. It shows an anger at a country so far away we can now understand it. The “pity of war” has moved so far away from these shores that we imagine it can never return. Poetry is the closest we come to contemplating its stark realities. When this country has fought — in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland even — the spectacle is one that most of us see on television screens and fought by someone else somewhere else. Ukraine, the nation torn apart by Western negligence, impotence and indecisiveness, has fallen prey to the obsession of one man. As no Western leader can really bear to tell their people, we have grown too used to peace. And that has fermented war.

Unlike Owen, Benjamin Britten was most certainly a pacifist. He was a conscientious objector even in the Second World War, and avoided propagandistic posturing throughout the conflict. He composed perhaps his most famous work, the War Requiem, in 1962. The occasion was the consecration of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, the magnificent medieval building destroyed by the notorious air raids of 14th and 15th November 1940. Britten wrote it for a country still marred by the leftovers of that conflict and fully enmeshed in the Cold War that followed, in a city slowly recovering from destruction. Britain was an insular country, struggling to find a place in a world that two wars had utterly changed.

The War Requiem weaves texts from the Latin Requiem Mass with Owen’s poetry. It combines a chorus with a choir of boys’ voices and three soloists, singing the six parts of the Mass. An orchestra of gongs, bells and two organs are to be positioned at various points around the performance space. As the chorus sings the Mass setting, they are interrupted by the soloists singing the Owen verse. At four points, the chorus and boys’ choir utter a shatteringly beautiful similar set of chords, ending each time with a major chord. After Britten’s immaculately dissonant chromatic harmony, dark and blistering orchestration, the piece ends with the hauntingly silent voices melting into a major chord.

The piece is built around the motif of a tritone — the most obvious dissonant interval in music. Before the advent of polyphony, such an interval was banned, branded diabolus in musica — the devil’s interval. Britten’s opening is suitably, deliberately diabolical: the strings striking an uncomfortable, pulsating theme against the whispered pleas of the chorus and the dull ringing of the bells. It sounds as if the chorus were trying to lift the fear of this death out of the ground, brutally mocking the lux perpetua and luceat eis which represent a false hope.

The War Requiem is a profoundly hard work to endure. It has attracted listeners by its incredible totality: this is a work to be experienced in full, basking in the magnificence of Britten’s despair. It is difficult listening, moving suddenly between blind anger and contemplative acceptance, dissonant bombast and melodious serenity. Yet this has never detracted from its popularity; the work was broadcast live on BBC, and the subsequent recording sold 300,00 copies. The public reception was instantly positive. Listeners expecting a tendentious pacifist monologue listened surprised to the sheer force of Brittan’s musical rhetoric, neither portentous nor neutral. The work is extraordinary as much for its reception as anything else. Despite the intellectual baggage which goes with it — Owen’s poetry, Britten’s notorious reputation, the sceptre of both World Wars — it has never stopped meaning something inexplicable to audiences. Describing its musical power is a hopeless task, since it is ultimately inexpressible. The silences at the end of most performances are similar in their wordlessness to those encountered at the end of a Bach passion or Schubert song cycle.

The most violent section of the piece is the Dies Irae — the day of judgement. The trumpet call which opens it leads onto the fragmented entry of the lower voices, followed by the roll-call of dissonant, disjointed militaristic callings from the brass. The drum-roll onto the huge brass chord is a moment of pure despair, the uncomfortably exciting explosion of brute force. The piercing sound of the boys’ choir at the end of the movement is like ashes floating upwards from the shattered limbs.

The premiere was a chaotic event. Britten’s demands on the musicians were immense, and many of the choir and orchestra were not fans of the piece. The organisers had attempted to bring together soloists from all three sides in the World War. Peter Pears, Brittan’s long-term partner, sang the tenor part with his controversial, beguiling tones. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, arguably the greatest Lieder singer of the twentieth century, was the baritone. The Russian Galina Vishnevskaya was booked as the soprano, before being banned from performing by the Soviet government. Britten’s point seemed to have been proved: the pointless cold stare of the bureaucrat remained in the current global conflict just as much as they ever did. Vishnevskaya came to Britain to sing in the recording three weeks later.

The War Requiem is not a universally loved piece, even among highbrow musicologists or Britten devotees. Some hear its bare textures and superficial banality, or the forcefulness of the writing, as oppressive. Igor Stravinsky hated what he saw as the too-obvious aesthetic point of the work: “Kleenex at the ready, one goes from the critics to the music, knowing that if one should dare to disagree with ‘practically everyone’, one will be made to feel as if one had failed to stand up to ‘God Save the Queen’.”

What Stravinsky saw as a fatuous reliance on contextual “significance” has been to the Requiem’s loyal audiences merely a key to the power of it. Britten does not tell us that redemption is anywhere near, or that religious consolation will be of any help to his listeners, dead or alive, amid war or peace. He merely expresses Owen’s “pity of war” in a music which is intrinsically pitiful, if never reverent. It speaks of not one war, but any conflict, just as Owen wrote of the obvious thing — guns, fire, screaming, death, squalor — present in every battle.

The music of Britten will not help the people of Ukraine now. The sight of a decadent West which Vladimir Putin has cynically exploited will be no less horrendous as the country falls deeper into the mire of a drawn-out conflict. Music, recollections, history, can only serve to remind us of what we think Ukraine is getting into, and what Russia has enacted. Only for the people who suffer at the whims of statesman, general and the wild contingencies of human violence, do Owen’s words offer anything:

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

Wilfred Owen died on 4 November 1918. His mother read of his death as the bells of her village church rang out at the news of the Armistice. In the world of his poetry, and in the startling power of Britten’s music, they have been chiming still; just as falsely and cruelly as before.

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