Britten: War Requiem

»My subject is War, and the pity of War,
The Poetry is in the pity…
All a poet can do today is warn.«

Benjamin Britten prefaced his War Requiem with these words. They were written by the British poet Wilfried Owen, who died as a 25-year-old in the First World War almost exactly one week before the armistice in 1918. In the »War Requiem«, premiered in 1962 in the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, Britten combines the Latin text of the Missa pro defunctis (Requiem / Mass for the Dead) with Wilfried Owen’s poems in English. The result is an oratorio which, despite its large-scale scoring (soloists, mixed choir, boys’ choir, symphony orchestra and chamber orchestra), is not a bombastic piece, but in large parts a work of quiet mourning and remembrance of the war dead.