March 11, 1965 Herewith a few further sentences on the Britten-Owen . collaboration. Written by William Plomer, contemporary British poet and librettest of Britten's opera Gloriana, they exhale a slightly more orthodox Christian piety than the letters of the last two weeks, - - -_ and do it with extraordinary sensitivity. I have just come across them, and thought you might enjoy them. R
It is a function of creative men to perceive the relations between thoughts, or things, or forms of expression that may seem utterly different, and to be able to combine them into some new form. Britten's Nocturne, for example, which unifies musically a group of poems by different hands, is a notable example of his power to connect the seemingly unconnected. It was a totally unexpected and weightier feat of imagination to see the possibility of combining together the traditional form of the Latin Mass for the Dead -- so formidable in its solemn grandeur, so grave in i~s religious and musical associations -- with the utterance of a young English poet killed many years ago in battle. The popular poet of the First World War was Rupert Brooke, who seemed to many to embody an ideal image of radiant British youth sacrificing itself for its countr y. His work was in tune with the conventional patriotic sentiments of the time. But the poetry of Wilfred Owen, who was killed in France just before the Armistice in 1918) after winning the Ivi ilitary Cross, had to wait longer to be known. Owen was only 25, but his poems were profound, and are profoundly disturoing. They made no app o.al to the accepted opinions of his time about poetry or war. They were not about what soldiers gloriously did but what they had unforgivably been made to do to others and to suffer themselves. Owen did not accept what he called 11the old Lie" that it was necessarily glorious or even fitting to die for one's own or any other country, or that a country was necessarily or perhaps ever justified in making the kind of war he knew. As he saw and experienced it, war appeared as a hellish outrage on a huge scale against humanity, and a vi olation of Christianity. He shared the destiny of millions on both sides, but unlike them he had the sensibility to see what war now really meant, and the power to explain it. "My subject
is War," he wrote,
"and the pity
of War,
The Poetry is in the pity. :
Into his poetry went the pity, not of a detached outsider or a sentimentalist, nor simply that of a humane officer . for his men whose lives he cannot save and to whom he cannot hold out hope, but the pity of an imaginative man for fello w-suffere:i:¡ s unable to speak for themselves to later generations. And since right could hardly be on either side in a struggle which, by Christian and humane standards, seemed to him utterly wrong, pity led to the vision of some kind of reconciliation beyond the tortured and shapeless present. This is most explicit in the line from the poem "Strange Meeting 11, which comes almost at the end of the baritone solo in the last section of the War Requie~, the quietly and simply sung "I am the enemy you killed,
It is now clear War, and, b'3cause the has been the central yotmg lives tormented
my friend.
11
that Owen was the outstanding English poet of tbe First World Second World War was a continuation of it, of that too. War horror of European history in this century; and Owen, mourning and treated as expendable, was to speak as directly to mourners
-2-
in 1945 as to those of 1918; furthermore, since the fear of war is now universal his elegies speak to us directly. They are a warning. To nobody grieving for the deaths of friends in the War which broke out again more than twenty years after his death did Owen speak more directly than to Britten, who has dedicated the War Requiem to the memory of four of its victims, Perhaps no composer has shown so remarkable a response to poetry, and no English composer has been more responsive to English poetry. And since there is no motif more predominant and recurrent in Britten 1 s works than that of innocence outraged and ruined, what could be more natural than that Britten, deeply moved by Owen1 s poetry, should be no less moved by the fate of the man who wrote it, his youth, his promise, his passionate tenderness, his rare talent cut off by the senseless violence of war? Be.. ing so moved, Britten 1 s impulse was to set Owen's most memorable poems for singing. It was a sure instinct that prevented him from setting them separatelf, . or as a sequence • . Certainly they have a kind of monumental nobility that enaoles them to stand alone, but he saw, as nobody else could have seen, that they could stand besid ~the sacred liturgy of the Mass for the Dead, and, musically, be combined with it. The theme of both is the same: it is death. It is death inseparable from griei and from guilt, death ordained by God for every man, often caused by human stupidity and cruelty, but death associated, in spite of everything, with ideas of mercy, forgiveness, and peace. Owen was the product of a Christian tradition, in which thes8 ideas are inherent. He makes quite clear his disillusionment with the failure of a Christian civilization to practise what it professes, as when he writes of the mutilated wayside Calvary and of those by whom "the gentle Christ's denied." This occurs in the poem that is here brought into the brief and beautiful "Angus Dei 11, with tr..e tenor's slow gravity heard so affectingly against the recurrent choral setting of the Latin text imploring the Lamb of God for peace. Then in the 110ffertoriurn" Owen 's poem about Abraham and Isaac represents the sacrifice as having acutally taken plac9, in defiance of the divine message from the angel. (It is remarkable how naturally the baritone's opening words "So Abram rose ••• " follow, as if intentionally, the Latin phrase about the seed of Abraham; and how the music recalls Britten's canticle Abraham and Isaac (1952) based on one of the medieval Chester miracle plays, and evokes the long scriptural tradition stretching backwards for ages.) Owen imbued with ideas of pity and of reconciliation (both of which imply hope) . shows himself essentially Christian, and, because of this, the elevation of his poE;,,1r to a musical synthesis with one of the most solemn of Christian rites, seems strange · ly in keeping. In achieving this synthesis, Britten has not only written a subli Tie new Requiem Mass, but has brought out the full force and charity of the utterance of an unforgettable poet. Directly and disturbingly he has given it a new, much wider, and perhaps lasting significance, troubling the deeper levels of our human nature .• There seems to be a general agreement that the War Requiem is the profoundest work Britten has yet produced, and good judges have called it his masterpiece, At its three first performances -- in Coventry Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and the Albert Hall -- its reception was not of the usual kind given to a work that impre~se c its hearers by musical invention and subtleties, and incidentally moves them by phas ~ of passion or of gentleness. It was received as a work of vast scope, in which the composer, by giving it all the technical resources and emotional power at his command, so transcends the personal that he seems to comprehend the sufferings, to transfigure the grief, and to honour the potential goodness of humankind. It is addressed (and with what poignancy!) to "Whatever shares The eternal reciprocity
of tears."