Scrap of paper at Benjamin Britten's home shows start of Wilfred Owen inspiration for War Requiem

This article originally appeared on Culture24.

New find could show start of Britten's plan to weave Latin Mass and Owen poems into choral masterpiece

A scrap of paper found by chance at the huge archive of Benjamin Britten, in Aldeburgh, could represent the moment when the composer came up with the Wilfred Owen-inspired central theme of War Requiem, the anthemic movement which reopened Coventry’s cathedral following its wartime destruction.

Britten’s partner, Peter Pears, wrote the words ‘?Irony. Owen anti Latin Requiem’ on a sheet of headed notepaper discovered in an unrelated pile at the home both men shared, noting page references to 11 Owen works in the Blunden edition of the First World War poet’s collections.

A pacifist who had adapted Shakespeare’s text for the opera of A Midsummer Night’s Dream alongside Pears, Britten spent much of 1961 writing the Requiem, instilling the movement with powerful irony.

'I am writing what I think will be one of my most important works,” he told the baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

“It is a full-scale Requiem Mass…and I am interspersing the Latin text with many poems of a great English poet, Wilfred Owen.

“These magnificent poems, full of the hate of destruction, are a kind of commentary on the Mass.”

The final selection of poems by Owen proved markedly different to the early outline.

“Several of the initial suggestions were dropped altogether,” says Kevin Gosling, of the Britten-Pears Foundation, who realised the significance of the notes.

“In the notebook Britten wrote out the text of Arms and the Boy, but then crossed it out in favour of At a Calvary.

“When writing out the poems in the notebook, Britten was also still thinking that The End would form part of the ‘Libera me’—as it is here in the early outline.

“However, he later used an arrow to show that poem’s eventual position in the ‘Sanctus’.”

The project has been made public on a comprehensive new interactive website dedicated to the Requiem.

“I always think that Britten is amazingly subversive in this piece,” says tenor Mark Padmore.

“People often think that it’s a great choral work that has now become part of the standard repertoire, but actually I think he’s doing quite dangerous things in it.

“He's taking the Latin Requiem Mass and putting in texts that really challenge it in many ways.”

• Visit warrequiem.org for more.

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Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk//history-and-heritage/literature-and-music/art511926-scrap-of-paper-at-benjamin-britten-home-reveals-wilfred-owen-inspiration-for-war-requiem