CJ Replay: War Requiem

(From the Choral Journal article “A Prayer for Peace Now: Britten’s War Requiem Revisited, by Charles Matoni.  A performance of the War Requiem will be a special feature of the 2013 ACDA National Conference.)

 

The War Requiem is obviously [Britten’s ] profoundest work. It is the most dramatic and unnerving setting of the Requiem since Verdi: and critics have already found that Verdi is the only composer he can here be compared with. Musically, this is-and may easily remain-Britten's greatest opera. The tragic theme is one which he was now ready to tackle, and to tackle with all the abandon that he showed in his lighter works, and in his less ceremonious approaches to death, terror and perversity. So he approaches the Requiem in anger, producing some of the most ravishingly beautiful sounds, and some of the most grotesque, that even he has yet achieved.  Few of his works are actually less mysterious, less forbidding, less elusive. Here is no understatement, no double-entendre; the composer threw himself at that audience as he had never done before: and somehow it worked. Somehow nobody has felt that this was anything but   the essential Britten.