Britten ghosts

Certainly, Benjamin Britten is one of the most eminent and influential figures in Twentieth century Music. He is one of the best English composers and perhaps, the one that truly translate the English language into music. His relationship with many of the most important poets and authors take him to create music that in a way alters and have a serious engagement with the literature text which is based on. This level of relationship with literature and music is one of Britten’s more particular and amazing characteristics. His close relationship with literature put Britten’s music into two realms, the music and the literature one. 

In 1961, Britten spent most of the year writing the War Requiem, which was finally performed at the end of May in 1961 and become one of Britten’s more acclaimed works. The Requiem is conceived in three planes: a setting of the Latin Requiem Mass for soprano, chorus and orchestra, another setting for male soloists and a chamber orchestra based on poems by Wilfred Owen, a war poet of WWI, and a third setting that evokes the innocence unstained by war, a separate choir of boys voices.

Britten’s Requiem is not meant to be taken as a piece of pro-British-war glorification. It is Britten most clearly statement of his pacifism and his anti-war convictions. The piece is a public and artistic denunciation of all the horrors of war. It is also truly significant that Britten intention with the requiem is to evoke reconciliation between the conflict nations after the WWII. He wrote the piece for three specific soloists- a German baritone (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau), a Russian soprano (Galina Vishnevskaya) and a British tenor (Peter Pears). This demonstrated his conviction with peace and it symbolized the importance of forgiveness and unity.

The text that Britten used to combine them with the Latin traditional mass for the death text was Wilfred Owen’s poetry. He was a World War I foot soldier who was killed in France one week before the Armistice. His poetry is strange, realistic and obscure, it is a clearly reflection of a man struggling with guilty and conflictive feelings. His topics denounced the life in the trenches and the horrors of poison gas. During his time Owen’s poetry help to change public perception of the war and it changes the literary conception of patriotic verses. Owen poetry is full of truthful, his poetry doesn’t feel conciliatory but it is certainly a warning for all generation.

Britten orchestration for the Requiem enhances the importance of Owen text and it represents and communicates the message. The Performers are divided into three distinct planes and are physically to create the atmosphere of distant. . The soloists who sing Owen poetry unify the piece with the mass of the death tradition and war poetry. The use of a tritone between C and F# also works as  a unify motif during all the piece. The boys choir and the organ gives the sensation of inhuman sounds almost like a distant eco, perhaps emulating how does the war sounds.

Britten Requiem is one of his finest examples on how he manage to fusses literature and music and make it a one being. His ghosts hover around in the form of a neurotic governess, an elder writer obsessed with a young boy, a sailor mad by guilt and the spirit of a crazy French prodigy. All that it remains is to simply listen.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
-- Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.

Wilfred Owen.