Time's Echo by Jeremy Eichler;

Author:Jeremy Eichler; [Eichler, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2023-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

In the War Requiem, Britten was able to deploy Owen’s verse like small detonations placed perfectly at key fulcrum points in the requiem text, thereby creating a work that simultaneously honors the dead in solemn tradition-minded tones and refuses to naturalize their deaths, to airbrush the brutality of war, or falsely separate institutional religion from the patriarchal power structures that made war possible in the first place. As a result, the War Requiem never lets the listener escape into a facile “rest in peace” sense of consolation. Britten seems to believe, as with Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw, that to say peaceful farewell to the dead is to forget them. Or conversely, as Nietzsche wrote, “only something which never stops hurting remains in memory.”

The work itself is immensely scaled, lasting ninety minutes and requiring a vast composite ensemble. The traditional Mass setting is mostly sung by a mixed chorus, its forces amplified at key moments by a solo soprano, and accompanied by a full orchestra. The interlaid settings of Owen’s poetry are in turn sung by tenor and baritone soloists, accompanied by a separate chamber orchestra. Finally, there is a boys’ choir, typically positioned offstage, which sings portions of the Latin Mass set in an older style, at once archaic and celestial, as if representing a more ancient and uncorrupted relationship to faith. Britten once described the boys’ choir as “the impersonal voices of innocence.”

The work begins with a somber, outwardly calm yet inwardly tense setting of the traditional “Requiem aeternam” prayer, the plea for eternal rest. Britten’s forces and his writing style here stand on the shoulders of the great requiem tradition, but the composer, once dubbed a “revolutionary conservative,” has filtered this tradition through a modern scrim. The bells that toll from deep within the orchestra form a dissonant tritone, an effect that is picked up in the chorus and instantly destabilizes the atmosphere. Irregular meters catch the ear off guard. The string lines have a lurching quality. Britten layers in the archaic-celestial voices of the boys, whose initial entrance has meter changes in every bar, and the chorus quietly intones the prayer, “Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord.” But scant rest follows as some six minutes into the movement, the tempo suddenly quickens, textures thin out, intensity builds, and the tenor bursts in with words that shatter the music’s already taut surfaces: “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” The line, from Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” brilliantly positions the soloist as if he were a fellow listener alongside the audience, now rising up to bitterly interrogate the music we have just heard. Those bells of piety, faith, and tradition, the sonnet suggests, only mock the gruesome slaying of men sent to their pointless deaths on the battlefield:

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons

No mockeries for them from prayers or bells,

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

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