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Quotes:
“Music does not exist until it is performed.”
- Benjamin Britten
“The old idea… of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting
up all night to write it is nonsense. Nighttime is for sleeping.”
- Benjamin Britten
The German raid on Coventry, England was code named “Operation Moonlight
Sonata” and devastated the city. Over a thousand people died or were
wounded. It was the first British city to suffer the extensive destruction
and loss of life that became tragically common during World War II.
Coventry was also the first British city to lose its cathedral as a result
of aerial bombing raids. The devastation was so significant that the German
Luftwaffe (air force) began to describe subsequent raids as “zu Coventrieren”
– “to coventrate.”
Several days after the raid, a worker in the cathedral noticed that two
enormous beams from the roof of the church had fallen, charred, in the shape
of a cross in the rubble. He tied them together and set them up against the
ruins. The Provost of the cathedral, Dick Howard, had the words “Father
forgive” inscribed behind the makeshift cross, focusing the energy of the
people on rebuilding the cathedral as an act of hope in the future.
When the decision to begin rebuilding Coventry Cathedral was made, 219
architects submitted plans into consideration. The winner was Basil
Spence, who commented on his first visit to the cathedral ruins. “I was
deeply moved. I saw the old cathedral as standing clearly for the Sacrifice,
one side of the Christian faith, and I knew my task was to design a new one
which would stand for the Triumph of the Resurrection… In these few moments
the idea of the design was planted. In essence it has never changed.”
Please visit the “virtual tour” of Coventry Cathedral.
Photo essay of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears
Benjamin Britten was commissioned to write a work for the consecration of
the new Coventry Cathedral four years before the ceremony. He welcomed the
commission as he was a life-long pacifist and had considered writing works
in memory of Gandhi and the victims of Hiroshima in the past. In the end,
he chose to write his War Requiem for symphony orchestra, chamber orchestra,
three soloists, adult choir and boys choir.
More information about Britten's War Requiem.
Britten handpicked his vocal soloists to represent the countries most
deeply affected by World War II, Germany, Russia and England. The tenor
part was written for his longtime partner, Peter Pears. Dietrich
Fischer-Dieskau, the German soloist, was found sobbing in the Cathedral
after the performance remembering friends he’d lost in World War II.
Galina Vishnevskaya, a Russian soprano and coincidentally the wife of cellist
Mstislav Rostropovich, was to have sung the premiere performance on May 30, 1962,
but at the last minute was prevented from doing so by the Russian government.
She was severely criticized by a Soviet official who said, “How can you, a
Soviet woman, stand next to a German and an Englishman and perform a political
work?” English soprano, Heather Harper, learned the part and sang the premiere
on 10 days notice.
The traditional text from the Latin Mass for the Dead is interspersed in
Britten’s work with poems by Wilfred Owen. The 25-year-old English poet was
a commander of a rifle company in World War I. He was killed in action exactly
one week before the end of that war in November 1918. A few weeks before his
death, he wrote to his mother recounting the circumstances in which he earned the
Military Cross by capturing many soldiers at a German machine gun position. He
wrote, “I only shot one man with my revolver; the rest I took with a smile.”
Here is a poem used in the War Requiem in Owen’s handwriting.
The juxtaposition between old and new is a theme that unites the Coventry
Cathedral and the text and music of the War Requiem. The design for the new
cathedral deliberately incorporated the ruins of the old. Similarly, Britten
interspersed Owen’s radically anti-war poetry, sung in English, with the ancient
rhythms of the Latin Mass for the Dead. And finally, in the music, he used
complex meters and unsettling harmonies of our time in direct opposition to more
familiar rhythms and consonant sonorities of an earlier time. The juxtaposition
of old and new, despair and hopefulness, discord and harmony brings each element
into clearer focus.
In the words of Orchestra historian, Mary Ann Feldman, “Britten’s anti-war
masterpiece… exploits the power of the music to shake our complacency and
renew our hope.”
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