In Remembrance....

Sorry I am a few days late with this post, but in spite of personal issues I need to share with you my three top musical selections for Remembrance Day.  There are many fine pieces both old and new, but these three are (in my opinion) true masterpieces and one of them is definitely undervalued.

Start with the oldest one.  In 1914, as World War One began, the English composer Edward Elgar wrote a piece called Carillon as a tribute to "Gallant Little Belgium" -- very positive and upbeat.  But like many other creative artists, the more private Elgar behind this public face was, I think, already consumed with doubts and fears about what was happening.

Remember Sir Edward Grey's famous remark as war broke out:  "The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime."  His words were much more prescient than the jingoistic optimism reigning in most public and media utterances of the day.

I believe that creative artists see further and deeper than ordinary folk into such situations.  Certainly, the poet Laurence Binyon did.  His patriotic war poetry struck popular notes (the staunch heroism of British soldiers, the courage of mothers at home) but there is an undeniable thread of darkness running through his verses, and I think it was this emphasis on the darkness engulfing their world that drew Elgar to make musical settings of his poetry.

The war was less than a year old as Elgar composed his setting of For the Fallen, but darkness reigns in his music as in the text.  Combined with two other poems, it forms a choral trilogy called The Spirit of England.  The work was finally completed in 1917, and in its half-hour length captures the heartbreak, sorrow, and doom which war had visited on European civilisation.  For the Fallen includes the most famous of Binyon's lines:

They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn,
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Oddly enough, Elgar's setting of these lines forms only a quiet interlude between the two massive, dark funeral-march hymns which begin and end the movement.  The final great climax and the long slow descent to quiet darkness and despair at the end of the work are built on these powerful lines:

As stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As stars that are starry in the time of our darkness
To the end, to the end they remain.

This profoundly moving music has been rarely performed and more rarely recorded.  I think the apparently jingoistic title puts many people off.  But you certainly should make the acquaintance of The Spirit of England.  The Chandos recording I have was made in the rich, resonant acoustic of Paisley Abbey in Scotland, and features the Scottish National Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Sir Alexander Gibson.  The accompanying Coronation Ode for King Edward VII is a very jingoistic piece, but since it includes the original and thrilling vocal setting of Land of Hope and Glory, replete with organ and extra brass bands, I think it is forgivable!

The second piece is better-known, but still deserves to be heard more often.  In the 1930s, Ralph Vaughan Williams pulled together a cantata which he called Dona nobis pacem.  The main portion of the text consists of three poems from the American Civil War by Walt Whitman, framed by settings of portions of the Latin mass, the Psalms, and even the famous "Angel of Death" speech made by John Bright in Parliament during the Crimean War.  At the heart of this passionate appeal for peace comes the intensely moving Dirge for Two Veterans.  Whitman's poem describes a not uncommon tragedy of the Civil War -- the simultaneous burial of a father and son, both killed in battle.  Vaughan Williams uses the full resources of the modern orchestra to build the thunderous climax demanded by Whitman's description: "...and the strong dead march enwraps me."  The final section erupts into a jubilant Gloria in excelsis as the composer envisages the world where war will be no more, but he ends in a more unsettled mood with the soprano soloist still pleading for peace.  My favourite recording of this cantata (I have several) is on EMI conducted by Richard Hickox with Yvonne Kenny in the pivotal soprano role.  It comes generously paired with the yet rarer oratorio Sancta Civitas with a young but already formidable Bryn Terfel in the central solo part -- and that's a piece I will write more about on some future date.

Finally, one of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century: the War Requiem by Benjamin Britten.  In 1941 the industrial city of Coventry was firebombed into destruction, leaving the smoking shell of the burnt-out cathedral amid devastation.  In 1962, a new cathedral was consecrated and Britten was commissioned to compose a major work for the occasion.  The result was one of the most unique works of music ever written.  Britten alternates his settings of the major sections of the Latin Mass for the Dead with the anti-war poems of Wilfred Owen, who died in the trenches a week before the conclusion of World War One.

The Mass is set for large orchestra, chorus, and soprano solo.  The Owen poems use a small chamber orchestra and tenor and baritone solos.  There is also a boys choir which adopts a more impersonal tone, seeming to come from a remote place outside the main body of the music. 

Britten's task was made easier by the fact that Owen used many Biblical references in his poetry, some subtle, some very overt.  One whole poem is indeed a parody of the sacrifice of Isaac by Abram in the Old Testament.  What could be more natural, then, than to juxtapose that poem with the Latin line Quam olim Abrahae promisisti et semini ejus ("As he promised to Abraham and his seed forever").

Right from the opening notes, it's plain that the composer means to make the audience feel a bit uncomfortable or disoriented.  The very opening features the first of many appearances of the tritone, the augmented fourth, the musical interval that was known in mediaeval times as diabolus in musica because it was impossible to harmonize.  But Britten does use it to disharmonize, and also as a melodic interval, continually shaking the ground the music stands on.

Generally, the settings of the Latin text and the poems appear in alternate sections, but in the Agnus dei they flow together.  The ancient Latin prayer and Owen's poem occur simultaneously to powerful effect:

One ever hangs where shelled roads part,
In this war He too lost a limb,
But his disciples hide apart
And now the soldiers bear with Him.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona eis requiem

Near Golgotha strolls many a priest
And in their faces there is pride
That they were flesh-marked by the Beast
By whom the gentle Christ's denied.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona eis requiem.

The scribes on all the people shove
And bawl allegiance to the state,
But they who love the greater love
Lay down their lives, they do not hate.

And then, on a quietly rising scale, the tenor soloist for the first and only time joins in the Latin text:

Dona nobis pacem.

The true emotional climax of the work comes in the final section.  The reiteration of the Dies irae builds up to one of the most shattering climaxes in all music, a cacophonous roaring which then gradually dies away to a gentle held note.  The tenor then begins Owen's most moving poem, Strange Meeting, which describes two soldiers meeting after death in a "profound dark tunnel".  They come to terms with the fate which led one of them to kill the other, and then end with the words of reconciliation "Let us sleep now."  This gradually joins with the final utterances of In paradisum deducant te angeli and Requiem aeternam from the choir, boys choir and soloists, and the final Amen is a decided question mark.

Britten's own recording, made shortly after the premiere, is one of the great historic documents of recorded music -- and in its most recent Decca re-release the sound has been miraculously cleaned of all the hiss that formerly marred the tape.  Among more modern recordings, my own preference goes to Richard Hickox on Chandos because of the richness and clarity of the sound (especially notable in that last humongous climax) and the inclusion of two substantial early Britten extras, the Ballad of Heroes and the Sinfonia da Requiem, both obviously linked thematically to the main work.  If you have never heard War Requiem, you owe it to yourself to do so as soon as you can!