"Give them eternal rest": At the beginning of this requiem mass there is an immovable question: "What death toll is there for those who die like cattle?". "Dies irae": Why do you fight? Not for flags, but for life and against death. The offertory of the funeral mass: Abraham kills his son Isaac and with him "half of the posterity of Europe". The question in the "Sanctus" rings with trepidation, will life ever regenerate bodies? The wise old man denies it. It is not the priests who proudly march across Golgotha who are worthy of the "Agnus Dei", of mercy, but those "who love the greater love." The concluding "Libera me", the cry for liberation. Will people ever be able to really rebel against war?
The "War Requiem" is a reckoning with the glorification of war. The premiere took place on May 30, 1962 in Coventry Cathedral, which was destroyed and rebuilt in 1940, and is dedicated to all those who died in the war. War and the suffering of each individual: Britten reflects both in the tension between the traditional Roman funeral mass and anti-war poems by Wilfred Owen, the large orchestra and an intimate chamber music cast, but above all in the urgent appeal: Death is always the death of each individual. Here man, in the form of defenseless crowds, is brought back to the stillness of a lullaby which, in the greatest desolation, proclaims that whoever slays an enemy may have been his friend.
