From Notting Hill Editions
It's still possible to make beautiful music out of conflict, says the writer Dennis Marks.
"My subject is war and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn; that is why the true poets must be truthful."
Thus, in celebrated and much quoted words, Wilfred Owen drafted the introduction to a collection of poems only published after the end of his brief life.
I first came across them in my early teens, not once but twice. The first time - as it must be for most adolescents - was in the classroom. Works like Elegy for Doomed Youth are darkly appealing to impressionable fourteen-year-olds.
But in 1963 it was its second appearance which lodged most deeply in my imagination. That year, Britain's two most prominent composers delivered their responses to a commission from Coventry Cathedral to celebrate its reconsecration after its near-destruction in the Blitz. Benjamin Britten appended the quotation to the title page of his War Requiem which interweaves Owen's war poetry with the Latin mass. His music is as poignant, dramatic and accessible as the poems he set. It has all the theatrical skill of his operas and it is the archetypical piece d'occasion.
The premiere was even planned to feature a British tenor, a German baritone and a Russian soprano, to represent the principal combatants in the Great War. As it turned out, our own Cold War prevented Vishnevskaya from performing the role until the Decca recording the following year. Nevertheless that premiere was appropriately triumphant, and repeat performances swiftly followed. Yet it marked a watershed in Britten's reputation. In the following decade, commentators and some audiences began to detect something a little glib in his theatrical juxtaposition of the liturgy and Owen's verse.
The other Coventry commission could not have been more different. Michael Tippett chose to offer not an oratorio but a full length opera. Like Britten, he was a pacifist and unlike him he had been imprisoned for conscientious objection in the Second World War. One might have expected a response even more pained and angry than Britten's.
However, King Priam is not an anti-war work. It is not a warning and it is not an appeal to pity. Tippett had already warned and pitied to memorable effect in A Child of Our Time, inspired by the pogrom of Kristallnacht which took place while Chamberlain was still appeasing Hitler, and Molotov and Ribbentrop were contemplating their disastrous pact. In that work he placed responsibility firmly in the hands of all humanity. As his libretto states: "I would know my shadow and my light so shall I at last be whole."
Note the verb"I would." War, says Tippett, is not something that happens to us. It is something we choose. Hence the subject of Priam is not sacrifice but choice. The response of the two composers suggests a dichotomy which has characterised "war music" for centuries. Britten and Tippett are not adopting pro-war and anti-war positions. They start from the same place but reach different destinations. Perhaps that is why my teenage self was more drawn to Tippett's choice than Britten's pity.
Half a century later, I now love both works, albeit for very different reasons. Yet the dichotomy remains and I was reminded of it during Armistice Week when I read an article by the music critic Jessica Duchen in The Independent. She wonders "where are the war requiems for the early 21st century? Maybe there's simply a feeling of hopelessness about new wars - that no amount of new requiems can undo the damage or even help the healing."
She cites Iraq and Afghanistan as examples of wars too daunting to inspire a musical response. I began immediately to test her hypothesis against wars of the past and present, and the response of composers to them. In Vienna at the turn of the 19th century, both Haydn and Beethoven wrote liturgical works which directly address the experience of war. Neither of them wrote requiems. They took the far more risky route of embodying war in masses not for the dead but for the anxious living.
In the Missa in Angustiis, Haydn even incorporated the fears of the besieged Viennese in the title. In his Missa Solemnis, Beethoven interrupted the Agnus Dei with an almost sacrilegious outburst from trumpets and drums at the words "Dona Nobis Pacem".
Both composers not only break the liturgical mould; they shift the focus from the collective to the individual. While the war music of previous centuries wore martial dress, at the dawn of romanticism they assert that military glory can no longer be taken for granted. Beethoven, in particular, evokes terrors similar to those in the dark paintings of his near contemporary Goya. The pity of war which they evoke has been the default mode ever since.
Do we assume therefore that, in the 21st century, terror and pity are the only possible musical reactions to war? There are a handful of exceptions. Some of them, composed largely in totalitarian societies, have depicted military triumph, in the old 18th century sense, but they have rarely been convincing. In Soviet Russia, composers were required to celebrate victory and, under Stalin's cosh, both Prokofiev and Shostakovich tried unsuccessfully to oblige. The Leningrad Symphony and the opera War and Peace were both intended to raise Soviet spirits during and after "the great patriotic war" of 1939 - 1945.
However, they both ask more questions than they answer. After Germany's defeat, Shostakovich's 7th Symphony with its banal and brutal ostinatos was initially dismissed by critics as so much enforced tub-thumping. It was only when Testimony - the memoirs which Solomon Volkov claimed to have transcribed from conversations with the composer - was smuggled out of the USSR in the 1970s that an alternative reading was proposed in which the enemy was not Hitler but Stalin.
As for War and Peace, it was suppressed in rehearsal for failing to be sufficiently positive. Since the fall of the Nazi and Soviet empires the default position has prevailed, and pity has been the order of the day. Britten even incorporated Owen's words "the pity war distilled" into the Libera Me of the War Requiem. Honneger's powerful 3rd Symphony Liturgique appends titles from the requiem mass to its three movements. More recently, Steve Reich's holocaust memorial, Different Trains, which fuses a string quartet with taped memories, and Michael Berkeley and Ian McEwan's anti-nuclear oratorio Or Shall We Die? both opt for fear and pathos. Much the same could be said of two Auschwitz-inspired operas, Weinberg's The Passenger, recently revived at ENO, and Nicholas Maw's Sophie's Choice.
These are all respectable depictions of victimhood but none of them take us any further than Beethoven's impassioned cry of Dona Nobis Pacem, two centuries ago. Has any composer stepped back from anguished empathy to question our own compliance in Vietnam or the Falklands or Iraq? Or is it simply not the business of music?
Beethoven certainly thought it was. The eruption of Napoleon's army into his Agnus Dei is scarcely required by the liturgy, but then Beethoven was one of those trapped in besieged Vienna. Shostakovich made a moral choice when he followed the Leningrad Symphony with his desolate 8th, much to the annoyance of the commissars. Its music undermines tragedy with irony and he paid the price until Stalin's death.
More recently, I can think of at least four post-war composers who addressed the subject of choice and individual responsibility in war. Two of them were born in Germany, where the issue was still alive a generation after the bombs stopped falling. Bernd Alois Zimmerman and Hans Werner Henze both served in the German army, although neither was involved in actual combat.
Zimmerman, who was invalided out of the Wehrmacht in 1942, excavated the cultural roots of war in his opera Die Soldaten, based on a play by Jacob Lenz. Henze, who was conscripted to train in Nazi-occupied Poland, also chose a drama from the past to throw a searchlight on the present - Kleist's Prince von Homburg, written during the Napoleonic wars, which directly attacks the militaristic ethos of Prussia. They are very different works - one savagely iconoclastic and the other dreamy and reflective - but they both ask the same question: how do we choose not to choose? In Henze's case, the answer was a kind of exile in Italy; for Zimmerman the existential solution was his own tragic suicide.
In post-war Britain and 1990s America, two other composers have confronted responsibility head-on. I have already mentioned that Michael Tippett's response to the Coventry commission was an opera about choice. King Priam is set in the legendary Homeric past but its drama is eternally present. When Priam goes to Achilles's tent to beg for the corpse of his slaughtered son Hector, he could be any grieving parent with a child killed in Korea or Helmand. The difference lies in the aria Tippett places in his mouth - A Father and a King. As a king, Priam has chosen a road that leads to carnage. As a father, he faces death as it arrives on his own doorstep.
The American John Adams chose a battle that is still being fought, not only in Palestine but in a theatre of war enlarged to the entire world through terrorism. In his opera Klinghoffer, soon to be revived at ENO, he allows us to witness the apparently meaningless and cruel murder of a disabled passenger on a hijacked boat from the perspective of the terrorists themselves. The choices he confronts in the choruses which comment on the action like Bach's Passion chorales are those of Israelis as well as Arabs. Tippett's pacifism and Adams's multi-culturalism both engage with the origins of war rather than its consequences.
Interestingly, both composers address elsewhere our own responsibility for the threat of nuclear annihilation - Tippett in his oratorio The Mask of Time and Adams in his recent opera about the birth of the bomb Dr Atomic. Both of them prove that music can engage the heart without suspending the brain.
This brings us back to the original dichotomy between Britten's "poetry in the pity" and Tippett's (rather than Sophie's) choice. The novelist and critic Philip Hensher has no time for the former. He describes the War Requiem as "a terrible literary sort of din" and, taking a sidelong glance at the Great War and Owen's death, sarcastically proposes that "since the War Requiem is about these two deeply moving things, it must therefore be deeply moving itself, mustn't it?"
In his collection of articles and speeches, A Singer's Notebook, the tenor and scholar Ian Bostridge responds thoughtfully that The War Requiem "is about far more than twentieth-century war and its horrors. It looks death in the face....." Well, so does Mozart, not to mention Berlioz and Verdi, but none of them felt impelled to add war to the liturgy.
Jessica Duchen is half right. After the Somme, Stalingrad and Belsen, empathy is not enough. I doubt whether Hensher would agree with me but, in my opinion, Tippett shows us another route map through these horrors. At the end of the War Requiem, the tritone - the discordant augmented interval which dominates most of Britten's mass - is resolved into a soothing consonance after the final words of Owen's Strange Meeting - "let us sleep now."
Now compare the concluding bars of King Priam. The king sinks before the altar, awaiting the Greek sword which will end his life and the kingdom of Troy. His words - "I see mirrors, myriad upon myriad....moving...the dark forms of creation" - are followed by the weird, dissonant wind chords associated with Hermes, the coldly objective messenger of the gods. In their notes as much as in their words, the two composers part company. Britten gives us tender reassurance. Tippett offers questions. Who says that such things are none of music's business? I am grateful for both "war musics" but I think I know which road I will take.
© Dennis Marks