Modern Masterwork

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned

Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

The text was by England's great World War I poet, Wilfred Owen, who was killed in France a week before the Armistice. The music was by Benjamin Britten, a passionate pacifist and conscientious objector during World War II. After the chorus in West Berlin's Deutsche Oper had chanted the final line of Britten's War Requiem, the stunned audience sat in utter silence. Then came volleys of applause. Britten's nonliturgical Mass is fast taking its place as one of the rare modern masterworks for the voice.

Britten's War Requiem was given its premiere last spring shortly after the re-dedication of Coventry Cathedral, largely destroyed by Hitler's bombers, and recently rebuilt. "The most masterly and nobly inspired work that the composer has ever given us," exulted the London Times. But despite such resounding praise even Britten's most unrestrained admirers harbored some doubts about how his Mass would be received in Germany. As the Berlin Philharmonic began playing the Mass last week, perhaps the most nervous man in the house was Britten himself, perched in the tenth row with the score in his lap.

Almost Hypnotic. To symbolize the work's spirit of reconciliation, Britten had originally selected an Englishman and a German for the two male leads--English Tenor Peter Pears and German Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. But Fischer-Dieskau, who was so moved during the Coventry performance that he was barely able to sing some of his lines, had an attack of bronchitis and was forced to cancel in Germany. His part was taken by Austrian Baritone Walter Berry. The audience seemed almost hypnotized from the work's opening lines to Owen's closing "Let us sleep now."

Britten's "protest against the destruction of life" moved on contrasting levels, with the mourning liturgical passages accompanied by full chorus and orchestra, and the Owen poetry (sung by tenor and baritone) accompanied by only a small chamber group. The general effect, as one critic noted, was "as though sections of [Mahler's] Das Lied von der Erde had been interpolated into the Verdi Requiem." The bells tolling for the dead in one segment of the Mass were echoed by Owen's line, "What passing-bells for these who die like cattle," while the distant menace of battle was evoked by the orchestra's strident tuba fanfare. A Latin lament sung by U.S. Soprano Ella Lee, was the refrain for the verses:

Move him into the sun--

Gently its touch awoke him once . . .

Straight from the Shoulder. The cheering audience called the three soloists, Conductor Colin Davis and Composer Britten back for repeated bows. Relaxing backstage with a leather-bound flask of cognac in hand, Composer Britten explained that he had not conducted the score himself because he was suffering from the mysterious psychogenic shoulder disorder that "happens to me only after I've finished a big work." And the Mass, he might have added, is one of the biggest works of his career. "It has been boiling up inside me for years," said Britten. "I had to find a language simple enough to convey what I wanted to say."

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