Music
Sublime Compassion
By DAVID CAIRNS
THE BBC's Westminster Abbey performance of Britten's War Requiem was, to judge by the broadcast (a tape-recording of which I have just heard), much more vigorous and accurate than the premiere at the Coventry Festival in May. The Coventry choir, which had apparently been recruited on the sound English principle of seniority by age, was a disgrace, and presumably only the gravity of the occasion— the first public event in the newly consecrated cathedral—and the overwhelming grandeur of Britten's conception, shining through inade- quacies and making them seem irrelevant, pre- vented people from saying so. Now that we have had what seemed to be a pretty authentic per- formance (conducted by Meredith Davies), and half a year has passed since the first astounding impact, it should be possible to come to critical terms with the work. Yet even now it looms too hugely for criticism to be anything but an imperti- nence, an activity not connecting with or touch- ing the work it claims to criticise. This may be an abdication of function, but it is the reaction a work of this scale and quality does, and per- haps should, engender; the critic is best occupied not in trying to rationalise what he isn't affected by in this or that passage but in trying to com- municate what moves him.
It is equally impossible to decide how much of the intense hold of the War Requiem on the mind and imagination is due to the inherent excellence of the music and how much to the fact that it speaks with fearful directness out of the experience and shadow of war to a uniquely war-affected consciousness. But does it matter if it is impossible? When a contemporary work of art appeals profoundly to its own time that is enough, for the time being. But we can say with certainty that if Britten's music survives and is admired and heard a hundred years from now, the War Requiem will be admired and heard, because it sums up everything that is most dis- tinctive in his style and because it is the creation of his most personal convictions and, like the Milssa Solemnis, strikes to the heart from the heart.
Britten has done this by grafting on to the ancient, ritually reassuring words of the Latin Mass for the Dead the far from reassuring poems of Wilfred Owen. The tolling 'Requiem' gives way to 'What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?' The 'Tuba Miruin' fades into 'Bugles sang, saddening the evening air.' The self-abasing `Oro supplex et acclinis' turns to 'Be slowly lifted up. thou long black arm, Great gun towering toward Heaven, about to curse,' the Lacrimosa into 'Move him into the sun,' Quam olim Abrahae' into `So Abram rose and clave the wood.' Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi' is interwoven with 'One ever hangs where shelled roads part.' The 'Sanctus' blazing act of worship becomes 'After the blast of lightning from the East' (the light brighter than a thousand suns); and soon.
This brilliantly imaginative scene has the effect both of quickening the timeless concepts of the Mass, bringing them alive and present, and of questioning the framework of belief which has been used for centuries by principalities and powers to justify and by people to console; that their hope may have been in the word made flesh is no longer good enough. At the same time the poems become even finer and more meaningful in the context of immemorial ritual and the multitude without number of the dead. At times the alternation of texts turns the screw of anguish unbearably: for instance, when the tenor's re- peated 'Was it for this the clay grew tall?' is taken up by the chorus in accusation, `Judicandus homo reus,' and the climactic cry, 'Oh, what made fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth's sleep at all' receives the resigned and even more moving answer, 'Pie Jesu, Domine, dona eis Requiem, Amen.'
Perhaps a convincing large-scale Requiem could only be written today in some such un- orthodox form. Britten's scheme is divinely obvious, as with many of his best ideas; and, as with them, it has waited for him to think of it. Simple as it is, probably no one except a tradi- tionalist of genius who is also a free spirit could have conceived it. It is a scheme of such beauty and splendour that for a gifted composer failure is impossible. It seems to me, on limited acquain- tance and for what my opinion is worth, that Britten's music is worthy of it.
As is to be expected, the score is a work of consummate craftsmanship, unified in a hundred ways, by cross-references, and recurring melodies, motivs, fanfares (which in 'Bugles sang' are heard largely on very soft woodwind, as if coming from a far-off world) and above all by the interval of a tritone—F sharp-C—the structural and symbolic principle which is pro- posed at the beginning of the work, like the con- tradictions in the soul of man, and in the end is not resolved but steps sideways through an unseen door into another dimension, a radiant, mysterious F major.
The individual beauties of the work will strike different people in different degrees. What I re- member chiefly are the ghostly fanfares of 'Bugles sang; 'Move him into the sun' and the accom- panying Lacrimosa, with its plangently dipping and soaring solo soprano line (Verdian in ancestry but like everything in Britten absolutely characteristic); the `Quam olim Abrahae' which suggests through all its vivacious rhythm and colour an inexorable sense of approaching tragedy and uses the music of Britten's Abraham and Isaac with devastatingly bitter effect; the heavenly familiarity, almost cheek, of the distant boys' voices calling `Domine,' Jesu,' as if only they are innocent enough to be on such terms; and most of all the tenor's 'One ever hangs where shelled roads part,' the gentle culmination of the F sharp-C tritone, and among the most sublimely compassionate music ever written which, once heard, becomes a part of one's deepest musical experience. But the War Requiem cannot be catalogued; it must be experienced as a whole; as a great cry of humanity out of inhumanity, which leaves the listener with the conviction that, if it cannot by itself change the world, he himself will never be entirely the same.
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