Benjamin Britten composed his majestic War Requiem in 1962 to celebrate the inauguration of the cathedral in Coventry which replaced the one the Germans had destroyed in 1940 – the contemporary Ukrainian echoes are deafening. This is not primarily because the score is punctuated by the musical evocation of cannon and machine guns, nor because of the mourning which permeates the work. It’s because of the two texts from which Britten had drawn his libretto: the Latin Mass of the Dead, and the poems of Wilfred Owen.
That heroic young writer, shot in Normandy a week before the Armistice, was the First World War’s greatest poet. And he evoked all the tormented emotions of living cheek by jowl with death, in the mud and blood of the trenches. ‘My subject is War,’ he wrote, ‘and the Pity of War: the poetry is in the pity.
’ The language of the Latin Mass has a terrifying force, while the language of the poems is so matter-of-fact that it breaks the heart. Britten’s masterstroke was to create a score – with three solo voices, two orchestras, and three choirs, one consisting of boy trebles – which could reflect the stark contrast between these seemingly incompatible modes. One couldn’t have wished for a more brilliant trio of soloists than the one conductor Antonio Pappano had assembled for this Proms performance.
Soprano Natasha Romaniw opened the Lacrimosa (‘weeping’) section with a sound of such dread beauty that one could sense the audience holding its bre.