While preparing for Juilliard's performance of the War Requiem, the Juilliard Choral Union's director, Judith Clurman, shared some of her thoughts about the work itself, as well as the additional significance it has taken on in light of the world's current situation:

As I conduct the rehearsals of the Choral Union, I often think about driving past Coventry Cathedral on a trip to Great Britain in 1983. It's hard to believe that trip was 20 years ago, and the world still cannot understand that we must learn from past mistakes.

Judith Clurman Photo by Nan Melville

I talked to the people in the car about Britten's piece. It makes me think about the cruelty and inhumanity of Nazi Germany. This monumental piece of music called for the stigmatization of war. This composer's music and this poet's words make my heart break. Whether we think about the tritones, the tolling of bells, the full orchestra, the chamber orchestra, the leitmotifs, the woodwinds' ascending lines calling us to heaven, the heartbeats of the timpani, the Choral Union and children's chorus crying out, we are all transported by this music and poetry.

It was written to be sung in a church, and I try to show that to the singers. My job is to transport them there, to inculcate a sense of that sound. I appreciate it when a composer uses every crayon in the box of tone colors, as Britten does here, including the sound of singers. I may be prejudiced, but I think the greatest works, the ones that touch mankind, are choral pieces, which bring together text and harmony and all the colors of sound. And it was incredibly daring of Britten to mix the Owen poetry with the Latin words. A lot of people know the Requiem text, and I expect they will say, "Look what he's doing with it!"

At the end of the piece, when the baritone sings "Let us sleep now," and the soldiers are dead, the organ, the children, and the full chorus paint the picture of death--and as the chorus resolves the dissonance of the tritone and sings "Requiescat in pace" at the end of the work, I am in pain. Perhaps it is the juxtaposition of a traditional Requiem Mass with the words of a soldier who was killed at age 25 that makes this piece so heart-wrenching to me, and to the world.

The minute the chorus begins this piece, singing a funeral march, you know it's not going to be like the Requiems of Berlioz or Verdi. Every great choral work is written for some occasion, but this piece has no celebration to it at all. It is about reconciliation between people on opposite sides. It is poetry about the incomprehensible, as important today as at any time.

Judith Clurman, a faculty member since 1989, is the School's director of choral activities and conductor of the Juilliard Choral Union.