Britten’s War Requiem: article excerpts
On Wilfred Owen
From the Columbia Encyclopaedia
Owen, Wilfred, 1893-1918, English poet, b. Oswestry, Shropshire. He served as a company commander in the Artist’s Rifles during World War I and was killed in France on Nov. 4, 1918, one week before the armistice. Owen’s poetic theme, the horror and pity of war, is set forth in strong verse that transfigured traditional meters and diction. Nine of these poems are the basis of the text of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (1962). Although Owen had worked on poems while living in France between 1913 and 1918, he never published. While on sick leave from the front in a Scottish hospital, he met the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who encouraged him to publish in magazines. He did, but these efforts were cut short by his return to the front. Two years after his death Sassoon arranged for the publication of 24 poems (1920).
However, only one week before the end of the war, whilst attempting to traverse a canal, he was shot in the head by an enemy rifle and was killed. The news of his death, on 4 November 1918, was to be given to his mother on Armistice Day. For his courage and leadership in the Joncourt action, he was awarded the Military Cross, an award which he had always sought in order to justify himself as a war poet, but the award was not gazetted until 15 February 1919. The citation followed on 30 July 1919:
2nd Lt, Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, 5th Bn. Manch. R., T.F., attd. 2nd Bn.
For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in the attack on the Fonsomme Line on October lst/2nd, 1918. On the company commander becoming a casualty, he assumed command and showed fine leadership and resisted a heavy counter-attack. He personally manipulated a captured enemy machine gun from an isolated position and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy. Throughout he behaved most gallantly.
From Wikipedia:
On 11 November 1985, Owen was one of the 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner. The inscription on the stone is taken from Owen’s “Preface” to his poems; “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”
On Coventry Cathedral and the premiere of the War Requiem
The Wooden Cross and the Cross of Nails (from Wikipedia)
The wooden cross and the cross of nails were created after the cathedral was bombed during the Coventry Blitz of World War II. The cathedral stonemason, Jock Forbes, saw two wooden beams lying in the shape of a cross and tied them together. A replica of the wooden cross built in 1964, has replaced the original in the ruins of the old cathedral on an altar of rubble. The original is now kept in St. Michael’s Hall below the new cathedral.
Another cross was made of three nails from the roof truss of the old cathedral by Provost Richard Howard of Coventry Cathedral. It was later transferred to the new cathedral, where it rests on its altar. The cross of nails has become a symbol of peace and reconciliation across the world. There are over 160 Cross of Nails Centres all over the world, all of them bearing a cross made of three nails from the ruins, similar to the original one.
One of the crosses made of nails from the old cathedral was donated to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, which was destroyed by Allied bomb attacks and is also kept as a ruin alongside a newer building. A copy of the Stalingrad Madonna by Kurt Reuber that was drawn in 1942 in Stalingrad (now Volgograd) is shown in the cathedrals of all three cities (Berlin, Coventry and Volgograd) as a sign of the reconciliation of the three countries that were once enemies.
The rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral (from Wikipedia)
The selection of Basil Spence for the work was a result of a competition held in 1950 to find an architect for the new Coventry Cathedral; his design was chosen from over two hundred submitted.
Spence (later knighted for this work) insisted that instead of re-building the old cathedral it should be kept in ruins as a garden of remembrance and that the new cathedral should be built alongside, the two buildings together effectively forming one church.
About the first performance (from the Daily Telegraph’s obituary of Benjamin Britten)
Britten’s intention was to conduct the premiere himself. Davies, who was at that time conductor of the City of Birmingham Chorus, began to rehearse the choirs in the autumn of 1961. As the date approached, complications arose. The Soviet government refused, on political grounds, to allow the soprano soloist Galina Vishnevskaya to take part, and her part had to be learned at 10 days’ notice by Heather Harper. Britten had a minor operation and arrived in Coventry for final rehearsals to find the acoustics appalling, the cathedral staff unco-operative and the chorus ready to walk out when an attempt was made to reduce their numbers because of lack of space.
Britten and Davies decided that the only way to save the day was for Davies to conduct the orchestra, chorus and Heather Harper, and for Britten to conduct the chamber orchestra accompanying the two male soloists in the settings of Wilfred Owen poems.
Davies and Britten also divided the conducting at the first London performance in Westminster Abbey the following December on a night of dense fog. Davies thereafter often conducted the work, and showed that a second conductor was not necessary.