War Requiem. Britten at La Scala whilst Germany returns to black and white

On Sunday 6 September, La Scala raised the curtain again after the summer: Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem opens the programme for the MITO Settembre Musica 2026 festival, whilst, at the very same moment, in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, the polls close, casting everything in a black-and-white 1930s hue: as expected, the Nazi-like AfD is the leading party. Immediately, shrill, vitriolic rallies break out: ‘Out with two million foreigners’, ‘Germany for the Germans’, ‘the national anthem in schools’, ‘Europe can’t go on like this’, and so on. The first thought that springs to mind is: better to be here listening to music than in Magdeburg cheering with a beer in hand. In the audience, mingling with the Milanese, sit stern Sikh tourists, what are likely to be African queens in Christian Dior, and pensive Middle Eastern businessmen in anthracite suits and silk ties. They are calm: they will continue to do business with the government of Saxony-Anhalt; the problem concerns other Sikhs, other Africans, other Middle Easterners.

Eighty thrilling minutes opened the festival that brings Milan and Turin together under the artistic direction of Speranza Scappucci, and a tribute to Britten on the fiftieth anniversary of his death – indeed, many of his compositions feature in the programme. On the podium, the Australian Simone Young, now a familiar presence at La Scala, conducts the RAI National Symphony Orchestra; Gea Garatti Ansini and Claudio Fenoglio conduct the Choir and the Children’s Choir of the Teatro Regio in Turin. Britten conceived his War Requiem for orchestra, chamber orchestra, choirs and three soloists – soprano, tenor and baritone: Elena Guseva, Nicky Spence and Bo Skovhus. Britten sought to blend the Latin text of the Missa pro defunctis with verses by the poet Wilfred Owen.

Glued to one’s seat by the beauty of this creation, a second, trivial thought takes hold: true art not only never dies or grows old, but has the ability to reappear right on cue – in this respect, it resembles history. Thus, we note the relentless timeliness of this Brittenian requiem composed in 1962: the most modern and spectacular in a long tradition – I am thinking of Mozart’s K 626, Brahms’s German Requiem, Verdi’s Requiem Mass for Manzoni’s death, and those by Berlioz and Fauré.

Without wishing to resort to melodrama, one suspects that a requiem might not be so out of place this evening; but a requiem for what? For an idea of civilisation well on its way to the graveyard? For the Old Continent as it lies dying? For Peace, that comforting sensation we have grown accustomed to taking for granted? Perhaps a requiem for the future? Whatever the answer, Britten captured the sound of that unease, as prophetic as all great creators.

In the summer of 1945, the English violinist Yehudi Menuhin, then aged twenty-nine, embarked on a tour of the devastated regions of Germany. Accompanying him at the piano was Britten, a tall, dapper 32-year-old with an aristocratic bearing and demeanour, a homosexual and a pacifist, and the composer of a rather transgressive opera, "Peter Grimes", which had recently caused a stir in London. During that brief tour, the two performed at the recently liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp before an audience of prisoners still wandering in a daze. In the wake of that emotional experience, Britten composed music for a series of sacred sonnets by John Donne. It marked the end of a long war, part of which Britten had spent in the United States. Whilst he was away from his homeland, on the night of 14–15 November 1940, the Germans had heavily bombed the city of Coventry, causing nearly a thousand deaths and reducing the medieval cathedral to rubble. After the war, a lengthy reconstruction project brought it back to life whilst preserving the site of the ancient ruins, and when the time came to consecrate it in 1962, the music for the ceremony was entrusted to Britten, who composed the War Requiem. A requiem denouncing war, but not merely that: something deeper and more complex, as elusive and mysterious as Britten himself was, despite his impeccable composure.

The son of a dentist and a middle-class lady with a remarkable talent for singing, Britten was born in 1913 in Lowestoft, on the Suffolk coast in the south-east of England – a long, provincial beach far from the hustle and bustle. The Brittens were a rather conservative couple, with many daughters and a young boy who, almost immediately, was recognised as having an extraordinary ear for music. On the other hand, his mother was also a musician and wasted no time in enrolling her son in private lessons with Frank Bridge, a remarkable figure – a violinist, conductor and composer – who was very open-minded and refined, had lived through the Great War and had composed a mournful lament for the sinking of the Lusitania: it was from him that Britten’s pacifism stemmed. Many years later, he would dedicate an elaborate tribute to his teacher in the form of variations. Bridge had been a highly regarded composer of the Edwardian era but had also absorbed the new post-impressionist styles. Britten had a mother at home who sang opera arias and Schubert’s Lieder, but he was interested in more modern works; he was fascinated by the atonal style of the Viennese school and, naturally, by the freedom and audacity of the Parisian scene. In 1930, he heard a piece by Schoenberg on the radio, and a few years later he was deeply moved by Berg’s Wozzeck, again broadcast on the BBC. He was not yet twenty, yet he had already produced a sizeable body of work, so much so that in 1934 the BBC broadcast one of his highly original pieces: a choral work for unaccompanied voices.

At that time, Britten won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music and had one of the most momentous encounters of his life. The college sent him to the film department of the Post Office, which was responsible, as we would say today, for advertising: the task was to compose music for short films to encourage the public to use postal services. So Britten set about composing functional music, and whilst working in this department he met the poet W.H. Auden, six years his senior, with whom he formed a deep friendship and an intense working partnership. Alex Ross writes in his book The Rest is Noise (Bompiani): “Auden took it upon himself to draw Britten out of his shell, socially, sexually and intellectually”. Auden would later precede his friend across the Atlantic, emigrating with another of his lovers, Christopher Isherwood, who was legally married. Auden himself would marry—Thomas Mann’s daughter, Erika. Isherwood had confided to Auden that his friend Erika had asked him to marry her so that she could leave Nazi Germany, which had withdrawn her passport. Auden agreed. Britten was part of the group, albeit younger, and would be reunited with his friends a few years later in New York. Unlike the two poets, however, Britten never felt the need to conceal his homosexuality through a sham marriage and had relationships with very young men, before settling more or less permanently with the singer (tenor) Peter Pears, who followed him to America. Before that, however, in 1937 – the year his beloved mother Edith died – Britten had been struck by the skilful use of the grotesque, the spectacular and parody in Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.

This heralded one of his most enduring friendships – that with the Russian composer – and one of the most significant strands of his output: opera, approached with an almost excessive eclecticism. The most famous, after "Grimes", is perhaps "Billy Budd", based on Melville’s novel, with a libretto by E.M. Forster; followed by The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare, and a twilight musical theatre reworking of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, in which autobiographical motifs—never fully resolved—fluttered through the story of the mature German writer in love with the effeminate youth Tadzio. His years in America were turbulent but fruitful. After a spell on the West Coast, Britten was welcomed into a sort of commune of exiles in Brooklyn, where he reunited with Isherwood and Auden, the young Leonard Bernstein, the writer and composer Paul Bowles, and his wife Jane. In a flat on the floor above lived Golo Mann, Thomas Mann’s son, who was often visited by his brother Klaus and Carson McCullers, as well as his sister Erika, a lesbian theatre artist now freed from the clutches of the Reich and also from the poet she had married in name only. This entire remarkable episode has a lengthy prelude in “Christopher and Those Like Him” (Adelphi) by Isherwood himself, a poignant and perhaps unique portrait of a certain Europe fleeing from raucous rallies and vitriolic proclamations.

The vaguely hippy atmosphere of the clique – which Bowles also described in his memoirs "Senza mai fermarsi" (Garzanti) – did not, however, sit well with Britten’s individualistic spirit. He put up with it for a while and then packed his bags. He was unable to return home until 1942 due to Nazi torpedoes targeting ocean liners, but the wealth of experience he ultimately brought back with him was considerable. He had gained first-hand insight into the shrewd stage production of Broadway musicals and had, in turn, shed any inhibitions regarding his private life.

Back on the British coast, he set to work on the score that would establish his reputation: "Peter Grimes", based on an early 19th-century poem by the poet George Crabbe, the story of a sadistic, alcoholic sailor who bullies and physically abuses one of his young crewmen, eventually killing him: This was a subject that, at the time, required a great deal of ‘bicarbonate’ to be digested, just as Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth had, but also, in certain respects, Berg’s Wozzeck, and, if you like, Janáček’s Jenůfa too. That is to say, the idea that the perpetrator is not merely the embodiment of absolute evil but also the product of a society where the strong inexorably crush the weak. Ultimately, a political subject. Ross quotes a pithy statement by Britten: ‘The more evil society is, the more evil the individual.’ But it seems clear that, for the composer, music can redeem the individual, because it is, first and foremost, a spiritual tension. Britten was a man of deep religious faith, lived out in a very personal way: whilst his music is indeed as modern as that of the colleagues mentioned, it has its roots in a tradition of lyricism that emerges unexpectedly in flashes, in rapid epiphanies, as if the ghost of Bach were suddenly to peep out from the rubble of the world. It is somewhat akin to Shostakovich’s conception of classicism: a turbulent relationship with the past. His love for Russian music is evidenced by the long friendship that bound Britten to the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, for whom he wrote the three famous cello suites and the Symphony, also for his friend’s instrument.

Certainly, Britten’s greatest work centred on the voice. In the biography Alessandro Macchia has dedicated to Britten (Edt), there is a statement that sums up his artistic philosophy and moral vision: “I undoubtedly write music for human beings – directly and intentionally. I reflect on their voices, their range, their power, their delicacy and the potential of their timbre”. Compositions such as the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 13; the Violin Concerto, Op. 15; and the Simple Symphony, Op. 4 bear witness to a unique talent. Undoubtedly, his statement takes on profound significance at moments such as 6 September at La Scala, when one closes one’s eyes and listens to the power of the chorus, where the solemnity of the sacred cannot be separated from the vitality of the theatre.

Britten knew the secret of making large instrumental sections come alive, of turning them into interpreters of something exquisitely human and pulsating. One need only think of the first interlude in Peter Grimes, The Storm. But it is in the War Requiem that this is entrusted to the human voice in a way that is rarely heard. One of the most beautiful moments—of pure beauty in terms of musical conception—is the counterpoint between the soprano and the choir in ‘Dies irae, dies illa’ (‘Lacrimosa dies illa / Qua resurget et favilla / Judicandus homo reus / Huic ergo parce Deus’). As the requiem draws to a close, however, we return (in ‘Libera me’) to the poetry of Owen – a poet who died at the front on 4 November 1918 – and the baritone and tenor find themselves face to face in a ‘Strange meeting’, like two dead soldiers from opposing sides at the end of a bloody battle: ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend. / I recognised you in this darkness: for yesterday you frowned thus / as you struck me and slew me. / I tried to dodge you, but numb and frozen were my hands’. Then, together, the two voices take their leave: “Let us sleep now…”.