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At 60, Benjamin Britten’s ‘War Requiem’ inspires fresh chills

The Boston Symphony Orchestra commemorates the anniversary of the composer’s epic antiwar work

Updated April 3, 2022 at 3:11 p.m. EDT|Published April 3, 2022 at 1:12 p.m. EDT
Soloists Ian Bostridge and Matthias Goerne, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and conductor Antonio Pappano leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra in “War Requiem” on March 31. (Hilary Scott/Boston Symphony Orchestra)
correction

An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect first name for Antonio Pappano. This version has been corrected.

BOSTON — What can music teach us about war? As images of the catastrophe in Ukraine flood our daily lives — the crumble of bombed city blocks, the looming plumes of black smoke, the obscenity of bodies in the streets — it can be hard to imagine that music has any light to shed on the darkness.

We’ve of course seen the images of musicians appearing among fresh ruins — a chamber ensemble performing for an audience sheltering in a Kharkiv subway station, an orchestra defiantly assembling in Kyiv’s main square. We know that hymns and anthems can inspire unity, stoke faith, foster hope. We know that music is a form of consensus — a stay against chaos. Music is always a gesture of hope, an allusion to peace.

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But music can also go beyond the surface of a photo or the depth of a report — it can peel back the veneer of patriotism and pride, it can pierce our psychological armor, it can sync to the heart.

Over the weekend, the Boston Symphony Orchestra revisited Benjamin Britten’s massive 1962 “War Requiem” with three full performances commemorating the work’s 60th anniversary, led by Antonio Pappano, guest conductor and longtime music director of the Royal Opera House. It was the BSO that gave the “Requiem” its stateside premiere in 1963 at Tanglewood, under conductor Erich Leinsdorf.

Nothing short of a modern colossus, the “War Requiem” is scored for soprano, tenor and baritone soloists, mixed chorus, boys’ choir, full orchestra and chamber orchestra. Its demands occupied every square foot of the Symphony Hall stage on Friday — and even extended into the halls beyond the second balcony, where the Britten Children’s Choir assembled just on the threshold of earshot, their recurring presence rendered haunting through ghostly distance.

The text of the “Requiem,” spread over what appears to be a standard liturgical framework in six parts, was drawn by Britten from two very different sources — the Latin “Missa pro Defunctis” (i.e., the “Mass for the Dead”) and a suite of nine searing poems by the English “war poet” Wilfred Owen, composed in 1917 and 1918, while the poet was in the trenches of World War I or the hospital. (Owen was shot dead in France while leading his company across the Sambre-Oise Canal, just a week before the war’s end in 1918.)

The juxtaposition of these texts is striking: The solemn devotions of the Mass — chiseled into one’s memory by rote — gain an intense gravity next to Owen’s visceral verses on Death and “the green thick odour of his breath.” The grace and sublime distance afforded by the traditional aspects of the liturgy are routinely undermined by the dirt under Owen’s nails: the “monstrous anger of the guns,” the slaying of “half the seed of Europe, one by one,” the “pity of war.”

But it is Britten’s bifurcated setting of these texts within the music that makes the “Requiem” such a blur of divinity and devastation: Its parallel tracks are actually skewed to converge and collide.

The liturgical structures — i.e., the ruins — were immaculately sung by the Tanglewood Festival Chorus (under the direction of James Burton) and soprano Amanda Majeski, who made a dazzling debut with the orchestra. She was a last-minute replacement for Russian soprano Albina Shagimuratova, who withdrew from performances in March after announcing her pregnancy. It wasn’t Majeski’s first time singing the “War Requiem” (she last performed it with the Colorado Symphony in 2018), and her experience was evident in her fearless attack of Britten’s challenging terrain.

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Passages of Owen’s poetry, meanwhile, are accompanied by a discrete chamber orchestra (itself set within the orchestra), and were sung at Symphony Hall by the powerhouse pairing of English tenor Ian Bostridge and German baritone Matthias Goerne. Both singers were extraordinary, Bostridge’s body arcing to articulate the shape of Owen’s words. He strung tension like barbed wire through lines that strip war of its merits (“Was it for this the clay grew tall?”). The slice of his opening salvo (“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?”) left a scar in my memory.

Goerne sounded equally strong and seasoned — he even mouthed the trumpet parts from his seat as he waited. His voice carried the perfect balance of mourning and menace, lamenting the bugles “saddening the evening air.” I’m more accustomed to hearing Goerne’s delivery suffused with tenderness, as on his many memorable recordings of lieder by Strauss, Schubert and Beethoven, but at Friday’s performance he was a vessel of torment. “Great gun towering toward Heaven, about to curse,” he roared in condemnation toward the close of the second movement (II. “Dies irae”). “Reach at that arrogance which demands thy harm!”

The “War Requiem” was originally commissioned for the 1962 reopening celebration of the Coventry Cathedral, which was almost completely destroyed by Luftwaffe bombings in November of 1940. And just as the reconstructed cathedral incorporated the ruins it was to replace, so too does the music of “War Requiem” feel built anew atop the traditional ideas of the form, supplanting its spiritual search with a psychological probe of war’s ravages. Britten doesn’t just undercut the Mass, he detonates it at strategic locations — at times you’d swear its structural supports are buckling like knees under the weight of its grief.

But even amid its competing cataclysms, there were stretches of intense, disorienting beauty in Pappano’s realization of the “Requiem.”

An uneasy dialogue between the unseen children’s choir and the soloists in the third movement (“III. Offertorium”) seemed to bend time and lay bare the stakes of war. The teakettle buildup of strings against the gentle murmur of the chorus in the fourth movement (“IV. Sanctus”) was one of many timbral highs. And the passing of melodic themes between the chorus and the orchestra at the convergence of the finale was a breathtaking display of Britten’s compositional dexterity — and the BSO’s gameness. This orchestra has a tightly coiled ferocity — an energy channeled by music director Andris Nelsons into the BSO’s ongoing endeavor to record each of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 15 symphonies.

There’s much that resonates anew about the “War Requiem” 60 years after its first sounding, especially in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

As a musical capture of the internal and external suffering of war — the rubble and blood, the misery and loss, the “loath and cold” hands of soldiers sent to battle — it’s difficult to imagine a work more garishly vivid, more unexpectedly revelatory than the “Requiem.” Technology has given us such a strange relationship to war — it rages in our palms, we swipe it into oblivion. We’ve never had so clear a view, nor so removed an experience. The “Requiem” denies listeners the chance to escape the grim realities of war; it disallows the separation of triumph and trauma.

Perhaps what’s most striking about the “War Requiem” in 2022 is Britten’s abject refusal to treat war as an abstraction. This music sinks us into the trenches and insists that we recognize each other through its fog.

Or, as Goerne sang before the “Requiem” succumbs to the uncertain peace of sleep: “I am the enemy you killed, my friend.”