When The Juilliard School was making plans last spring to present the Juilliard Symphony, vocal soloists, children's chorus, and the Juilliard Choral Union in Benjamin Britten's War Requiem on April 9, 2003, at Carnegie Hall, no one could have foreseen the grim timeliness of the event. With our country now at war with Iraq, Britten's cautionary message impacts us more keenly than ever. Here are excerpts from the program notes by David Wright; comments by Choral Union director Judith Clurman and chorus member Dennis Longwell can be read by going back to the main article menu at the bottom of the page.

The War Requiem of Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) is the culmination of a long journey by which a young lad from an ordinary middle-class home in a windswept small town on the eastern tip of England became not just his country's greatest living composer, but a spokesman for his war-wounded generation everywhere, and for others to come.

Benjamin Britten in the mid-1950s. Photo by Kurt Hutton © Peter Hutton. Courtesy of Oxford University Press.

Any account of that journey would have to include the boy Benjamin's famously intense, daylong lessons with the composer Frank Bridge, where the subject matter included not just the techniques of playing and composing, but the state of the world, with all its moral and ethical complexities. Temperamentally a gentle soul, young Britten found the strength for a lifetime of steadfast pacifism during these sessions.

In a nation at war, Britten and his lifelong companion, the tenor Peter Pears, were conscientious objectors. Britten did not follow the path of Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), the gifted young poet who donned his country's uniform in the Great War, saw combat in France, wrote poems that eloquently and bitterly deplored war, and was killed in action on November 4, 1918, one week before the armistice.

The success in 1945 of his opera Peter Grimes marked Britten as a master of the psychological element in music. The 32-year-old composer, however, continued to be moved by world events, and longed to create the kind of great "public" commemorative works that Shostakovich was doing in the Soviet Union, for example in his "Leningrad" Symphony of 1941. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, which occurred just two months after the Grimes premiere, so appalled Britten that he planned to compose a grand oratorio for orchestra, chorus, and soloists titled Mea Culpa. In 1948, the assassination of Ghandi made him contemplate composing a requiem in the Indian leader's honor.

Conductor David Atherton, who will lead the April 9 performance.

Although neither of those projects bore fruit, when the arts committee of the city of Coventry approached Britten in October 1958 to request a work for the dedication of the new cathedral, he was ready. The previous cathedral, dating from the 14th century, had been destroyed during an 11-hour bombardment in November 1940 that also wiped out the rest of the city's center. Its ruined walls, with their empty windows, were left standing as a memorial and a cautionary reminder of war's ravages. Next to it, the new cathedral, in a modern style, was going up. Britten's imagination, already fired by deep indignation at cruelty and violence in world events, now seemed to find in architecture a model for the kind of statement he wanted to make in music: a creative confrontation between old truths and new realities, the Latin Mass for the Dead and Wilfred Owen's fierce poems for the dead.

Foremost among the latter was "Strange Meeting," a favorite poem of Britten's. This evocation of an afterlife in which two soldiers, enemies in life, find a kind of weary reconciliation would become the keystone of Britten's Requiem text. Pears would, of course, take the tenor part in this setting, and he and Britten were able to engage the baritone Dietrich Fisher-Dieskau, who had been in the war as a German soldier and prisoner of war. In Britten's plan, these two men would sing the Owen poems in a frank and earthy style, accompanied by a chamber orchestra; the chorus would intone the texts of the Latin mass, with a large symphony orchestra; and a boy's choir in the distance would offer hymns of praise to God, with organ accompaniment, like an angelic host far above the squalid human scene. In 1961, Britten added a solo soprano part to the work for the Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, thereby widening his international cast to include another nation that had suffered grievously in the war--the Soviet Union--and to put a luminous solo vocal presence (à la Verdi's Requiem) into his setting of the Latin text. (Vishnevskaya was prevented by Soviet authorities from singing the premiere, but sang and recorded the work six months later.)

Juilliard Symphony and Choral Union Britten's War Requiem Carnegie Hall Wednesday, April 9, 8 p.m. For ticket information, please see the calendar.

The Coventry premiere on May 30, 1962, which was broadcast live on the BBC, and subsequent performances in Berlin in November and in London in December, seem to have had a cathartic effect on listeners, for whom memories of the war were still fresh, even though a decade and a half had passed. William Mann, the distinguished critic of The Times of London, wrote in December 1963: "The War Requiem has caught the public imagination to an almost unheard-of degree."

Some 40 years later, shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, the conductor James Conlon led a performance of the War Requiem with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. His observations, as quoted in an article by Matthew Gurewitsch in the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times on October 7, 2001, have a familiar ring. When asked whether audiences today will want to hear Britten's message right now, Mr. Conlon replied:

"Maybe it's very important to hear a voice of pacifism to balance a very natural desire for vengeance. I certainly wouldn't know what to do now if I were president. But transcendent music like the War Requiem goes beyond particulars. It strikes a deep chord that is beyond philosophy. It's impossible to play this music and not feel a deep sympathy for everyone who has suffered and, specifically, who has suffered from violence."

David Wright writes articles for The New York Times and program notes for Lincoln Center, the 92nd Street Y, The Juilliard School, and other concert presenters.