Juilliard Choral Union member Dennis Longwell reflects on the personal relevance of participating in a performance of Britten's War Requiem at a time when the work's subject matter seems more immediate than historical.

In the year following the destruction of the World Trade Center, I sang in the chorus of three different performances of the Mozart Requiem, including a beautifully realized concert last fall conducted by Judith Clurman at The Juilliard School. As a lifetime choral singer, I have learned that the joy of being a part of such a performance lies in its almost overwhelming power to express emotion and beliefs that I alone could never articulate--indeed, that I consciously never knew I had. Death is an abyss. God is just. Christ is gentle and loving. Paradise exists and is filled with music.

Read as words on a page, these ideas seem quaint and unknowable. When sung above Mozart's magnificent music, they ring radiantly true--at least for the moment. Such is the power of great music, and this feeling of rightness in these performances was underlined for me by the fact that, like the disaster it commemorated so eloquently, the Requiem itself was a ruin--unfinished, imperfect, tragically human.

Wilfred Owens, whose poetry Britten used for his War Requiem. Owen was killed during World War I.

Singing in the chorus of Benjamin Britten's great War Requiem has given me yet another belief difficult for me to articulate alone: War is madness. First performed in May of 1962, this, the greatest of Britten's many choral works, was commissioned to commemorate the rebuilding of the cathedral in Coventry, England, which had been destroyed by German bombs at the height of World War II. And with what Mervyn Cooke (in his excellent analysis of the War Requiem published by Cambridge University Press in 1996) has called " ... inspired simplicity entirely typical of his compositional genius," Britten chose a single musical interval to both unify and " ... symbolize the essentially ambiguous and unresolved nature of the War Requiem's message." This device, the augmented fourth or tritone, permeates the fabric of the piece, giving it the kind of tragic sense of incompleteness inherent in Mozart's masterpiece. Britten used the tritone, the veritable "devil in music," as a unifying element in his great work. We hear it in the strange, dissonant bells ringing at the very beginning, echoed in the chorus's hushed "Requiem aeternam." It returns throughout the piece, but nowhere more tragically than in the final seven measures of the piece. Cooke describes the powerful, disquieting effect of the work's conclusion: "Defeated, almost dejected, the chorus adopts the familiar tritone ... for the final 'Requiescat in pace,' now shortened to two brief phrases and resolving the all-pervasive interval into that alien F-major chord which seems to make the ending of the War Requiem so profoundly unsettling."

That is how I feel now as our nation is at war in Iraq.

Dennis Longwell teaches the history of photography and 20th-century art at Pratt Institute and Parsons School of Design. He also sings baritone in the Riverside Choral Society and the Dessoff Symphonic Choir.