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Royal Theatre
November 8, 2014
On the radio recently I heard a listener complaining about the CBC's wall to wall coverage of the season's remembrance events as a long glorification of war. The voice turned out to belong to a Canadian veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who was deeply concerned about the failure to address the dark side of war and the pressing need to put more energy and resources into understanding and averting the causes of it. I found myself breathing a sigh of "Yes" and his clear and persuasive voice surfaced in my thoughts as the impact of Britten's astonishing War Requiem unfolded like a tsunami in answer.
A pacifist from his youth, Britten was invited by Yehudi Menuhin to accompany him to Belsen after the war, and the horror that he experienced there remained too deep for speech until the end of his life, but affected everything he subsequently wrote. The commission in 1956 to write a Requiem for the inauguration of the rebuilt Coventry cathedral provided him with the opportunity he had long been seeking to express the full range of paradox and conflicting emotions generated by the destructiveness of war. The structure he chose, contrasting the powerfully painful narratives of the first world war poet, Wilfred Owen, articulated by a tenor and a baritone, with the Latin texts of the Mass sung by a full choir with a towering soprano presence, ghostly interruptions at intervals from a distant chorus of heavenly boys' voices like a faint light of hope, was received with enormous enthusiasm in 1962 and marked him out as perhaps the greatest English composer since Purcell.
The performance here in Victoria, more than 50 years later, seemed as potent, powerful and necessary as the original one must have been. The arc of the story is told in the selection of poems. Britten's ability to set words of such poignancy with musical phrasing that seeks only to penetrate and illumine the meaning was complemented in full by Butterfield's masterfully vulnerable tenor and Addis' richly sensitive baritone. I am still haunted by images: the pallor of young women left behind, the slow drawing of blinds at dusk - both to shut out the dangerous light and to achieve some distance from the fear of what was happening to the young lovers and brothers in those trenches. The fierce and tender rawness of the soldiers' actual experience was interleaved with the more reassuringly familiar texts and cadences of the Mass, which nevertheless raises the profoundest of questions, and the right to ask them. The central scene is the one in which God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, then offers to accept a ram instead. The moment when the tenor and baritone together sang "But the old man would not do so, but slew his son - And half the seed of Europe one by one" was utterly chilling. Accompanied by the skin prickling realization that the call to sacrifice our sons has more to do with humanity's own pride and arrogance - the most forcefully repeated words in the whole text - than any divine requirement, let alone political necessity.
The choir, expertly buttressed by Vox Humana, accomplished the daunting challenge of grounding the enormous emotional journey from the opening tolling of the funeral bells through the cacophony of death and dying, the terrible waste, futility and loss in truths untold and lives not lived, the pleading for reassurance to the final reconciliation, with superlative poise and conviction, Joni Henderson's incandescent voice sometimes evoking the angel of death, sometimes the tears of Earth herself. The texts of the Mass became less about a future day of wrath, a future judgement and more a condemnation of battlefield carnage now, and in that sense achieved a relevance that was deeply compelling. The distant sweetness of the children's choir offered the gleam of hope that the very young always offer.
This was a brilliant achievement all round, and an enormous tribute to Maestra Tania Miller's vision and determination. I think it would be a wonderful legacy to hear it performed every November. It is a modern work that cannot possibly be grasped in one hearing, and deserves to become deeply familiar to its audiences, as the Baghavad Gita is to every Indian, for the sake of all who fight wars and to challenge us afresh to ponder its questions. It is not enough that the enemies meet in peace after death, though indeed, the fact that we can imagine that peace, and experience it through music, is a beginning.
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