All is most certainly not fair in love and War Requiem

There were in fact two new and large scale choral works that had been commissioned for performance as part of the celebrations surrounding the consecration of Coventry Cathedral 50 years ago this May. One lost out to pacify the outspoken passions of the other. This is just part of the story of two titan works that Michael Foster’s book brings to life.

Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem was to be preceded six days earlier by an eighty minute cantata by Sir Arthur Bliss then Master of the Queens Music. Bliss’ The Beatitudes was a cantata for soprano, tenor, chorus, organ and orchestra. Its composition was intended for the vast spaces of the Cathedral and contained a substantial part for the magnificent new Harrison Organ – both still amazing visual and aural features of the Cathedral.

Rehearsals for both major works were dogged with problems from the outset.  

War Requiem was particularly problematic. The early joint rehearsals were taken by Meredith Davies, the first in  Coventry’s Central Methodist Church with the chorus ‘spread all over the place upstairs and down and Meredith Davies valiantly trying to fuse them into one complete unit.’

Britten (sitting) with Peter Pears who sang at the premiere of War Requiem in Coventry Cathedral

Other joint rehearsals took place in the Sibree Hall, the Police Assembly Hall, King Henry VIII School and the Coventry Theatre. The latter being the venue for the rehearsals for The Beatitudes.

With two new, large-scale works to be learned, a chorus that collectively did not have a great deal of experience (or expertise), rehearsals became ‘traumatic’ and, as the performances came closer, ‘every night of the week’.  

By the time Britten arrived to participate in the later joint rehearsals of War Requiem what he found was a ‘shambles’, re-enforcing his original anxieties about the use of an ad hoc, ‘amateur’ chorus. By 30 April 1962 (some four weeks before the first performance) Britten was in despair about the viability of the Coventry project because the chorus could not master the complexities of the score.

Britten’s attitude to the chorus turned hostile as he ended the joint rehearsal in Coventry’s Methodist Central Hall at the end of April with words to the effect that ‘this [War Requiem] is not going to happen.’

Something had to change.

The casualty of this particular war was The Beatitudes. The premiere was due to take place in the Cathedral on the night of the Consecration, 25 May 1962, but because of Britten’s panic over War Requiem and the need for more rehearsal time, a late decision was made to move The Beatitudes to the cramped and acoustically dead surroundings of the Coventry Theatre.

Bliss was devastated and, to this day The Beatitudes has never been performed in Coventry Cathedral for which it was so lovingly created.

Musical commentators almost universally refer to The Beatitudes as inferior to War Requiem, insignificant by comparison, a lesser work.

Those who will be lucky enough to be part of the audience on 22^nd September when for the fist time The Beatitudes will be performed in the place for which it was written and accompanied by the organ for which much of the music was intended – they will surely see that this is no lesser a work.

Coventry Cathedral will enjoy The Beatitudes for the first time – 50 years and 4 months late, but so much better than never.

The new book - THE IDEA WAS GOOD - is now available for sale at £12.75 from Coventry Cathedral or on line at www.warrequiem.co.uk.

It tells the story of Coventry's phoenix-like growth after the war; of the Cathedral's commission as a beacon of hope and symbol of peace and reconciliation; and how War Requiem was written for and performed at its Consecration Festival in

May 1962.

Published by Coventry Cathedral with profits going to the Jubilee Fund.

All a poet can do is warn

“All a poet can do is warn.

That is why a true poet must be truthful.” 

                       The immortal statement of Wilfred Owen.

This was the essence of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, written for and performed for the consecration of Coventry Cathedral, 50 years ago and celebrated in THE IDEA WAS GOOD, Michael Foster’s story of the turbulent events that stirred work and its performance.

Both during the war years and afterwards (and perhaps even as you read this) the dead are returned to the living in prose and poetry.

Many writers used verse to keep the voices of the fallen alive, by speaking for them, to them and about them. Soldiers, particularly, developed their own way of doing this and their soliloquies were sad, evocative, often moving. Much of this verse was written by men who continued to serve, even when they knew the madness of doing so. In one sense, therefore, war poetry is a set of meditations on the dead and their passing.

When commissioned to write a major choral piece for the consecration, Britten seized the opportunity to write not only a Requiem for those who had died, but also a parable for those who had survived and for much of his texts he chose the poems of Wilfred Owen.

Owen fought as a British Infantry Officer and was awarded the Military Cross, but he described himself as a ‘conscientious objector with a very seared conscience’. His writing was offered bitter with terrible, but vivid, portrayals of the death-struggles of gassed men, or painful death in a hail of machine-gun bullets.

If Britten’s music was the sheath,

the raw steel of bloodied sword were the words of Wilfred Owen.

For his 21^st Birthday, Wilfred Owen’s brothers and sister gave him Shelly’s complete works of poetry. This was to feed Owen with some of the inspiration for what many consider to be his most troubled poem – ‘Strange Meeting’.

Shelly’s ‘The Revolt of Islam’ is a symbolic parable on liberation and revolutionary idealism following the disillusionment of the French Revolution. As Shelly explains in the preface, he uses the power of poetic verse to promote: “a virtuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty and justice, that faith and hope in something good, which neither violence nor misrepresentation nor prejudice can ever totally extinguish among mankind”.

This struck the chord for Owen and sounded the apocalyptic trumpets of Hades for Britten.

Owen wrote Strange Meeting just months before he died in bitter irony, struck down by a hail of machine gun fire on one of the last attacks of The Great War. Siegfried Sassoon called it "Owen’s passport to immortality".

Strange Meeting recaounts a dramatic meeting between two dead soldiers who had fought on opposing sides. No longer enemies, they find it possible to see beyond conflict and hatred in a shared awfulness of "the truth untold". Hence the words of Owen's famous preface; "All a poet can do is warn".

The words of Strange Meeting figure strongly in the last section of War Requiem.

…I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now…

By his dead smile I knew we stood in hell.

http://www.warrequiem.co.uk/

The Story of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem

War Requiem is the powerful choral piece commissioned for and performed at the Festival that marked the Consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral 50 years ago.

Its story is part of the story of Coventry Cathedral’s phoenix-like rise from Coventry’s post war ashes is a wonderful tale of hope, passion and hard work.

It is hard to imagine quite how vast were the individual and global efforts that went into every element of the design, construction, creation and production that delivered the many cathedral components.

Whilst Sir Basil Spence inspired the world with his architectural vision; as Sutherland laboured on his remarkable tapestry ‘Christ the King’; and even as Epstein forged St Michael’s victory over Satan (left) … Benjamin Britten was commissioned to create a choral opus to be performed at the Consecration.

This extraordinary new book by Michael Foster captures and eloquently shares the woven tapestry of artistic emotions that led to the creation and performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem.

It is written and now published to celebrate the Cathedral’s Golden Jubilee.

Published by the Cathedral and with profits going to the Cathedral.

War Requiem concerns the brutality and futility of war; the senseless suffering, monstrous death and the destruction that it brings.

A setting of the Latin Requiem Mass is interspersed with the sardonic and disillusioned First World War poetry of Wilfred Owen. If Britten’s music was the sheath, the raw steel of the bloodied sword was Owen.

The book is as it suggests, ‘a story’. It is accessible as a piece of incredible post war history and an intuitive missing piece of the Britten jigsaw. Find out why Coventry is a Cathedral that was very nearly never built; and why War Requiem is a work very nearly never heard.

Visit website and purchase the book at: http://www.warrequiem.co.uk/