A Musical Transformation: Wilfred Owen to Benjamin Britten

Wilfred Owen, now one of the most renowned poets of World War I, was killed in battle a week short of the Armistice. His work constitutes a body of poetry protesting against the iniquities of war, primarily written in what was for Owen the annus mirabilis of 1917 when he was being treated for shell-shock at Craiglockhart War Hospital. Through the voice of experience, Owen’s poetry “tersely and disturbingly stripped war of any sense

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Britten’s juxtaposition of texts reinterprets and magnifies what Owen describes as the “actualities of war,” scenes of destruction which have previously been unwelcome in sacred music.

In “Libera Me,” the final movement of War Requiem, the Latin and English remain harshly juxtaposed. The action of the poem recalls Owen’s own harrowing experience in what he describes as “seventh hell. In 1962 Britten revisited the sacred Latin text he had employed in Sinfonia da Requiem, selected a series of poems from the work of Wilfred Owen, another British poet, and turned to his own Requiem. The melodic phrasing of the tenor’s part does not correspond with the metrical structure of the poem, resulting in an erratic delivery. Britten’s bold treatment of the Requiem echoes Owen’s refusal to adhere to the traditional subject of his preferred poetic form, the sonnet. It is these chilling sounds, and thus the soldiers’ experience, which Britten replicates musically throughout the work. Struck by the subtle complexities of poetry already so aurally lyrical, already half-sung, Britten selected nine of Owen’s poems over which he added his own layer of musical language. A sudden, pivotal change in register constitutes the crux of the poem: a powerful shift from grandiloquence to raw, tragic simplicity occurs in the line, “I am the enemy you killed, my friend. Britten’s approach to capturing “the pity of war” and “the pity war distilled” can be likened to the architectural construction of St.

II An analysis of Owen’s war poems employed in War Requiem

“Anthem For Doomed Youth” is an elegiac sonnet whose imagery corrupts the sanctity of Christian funerary rites. They create a tension which Owen felt captured the discord of war, and their position as heroic couplets undermines the glorification of heroism as a public virtue.

The musical setting of “The Next War,” once again, places listeners in the thick of battle. We glimpse fragments of his past life “at home” and “in France,” but return to the bleakness of “this morning and this snow,” where he now lies motionless.

Musically brilliant and profoundly moving, War Requiem is also disturbing and highly uncomfortable in its juxtaposition of two texts which compete with and redefine each other.

Common topics in this essay:
Doomed Youth, Strange Meeting, War Describing, War Requiem, Britten Owens, Dies Irae, Agnus Dei, Day Wrath, Isaac God, Benjamin Britten, war requiem, doomed youth, anthem doomed, anthem doomed youth, dies irae, owens poetry, agnus dei, latin text, musical setting, strange meeting, war requiems, calvary near ancre, demented choirs wailing, rifles rapid rattle, rapid rattle patter,

Approximate Word count = 5721
Approximate Pages = 23 (250 words per page double spaced)

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