Saddest Music in the World

Illustration by Jillian Tamaki.

“Remember,” a Russian bass sings, “through the years, through the centuries. Remember.” This is the invocation that begins and ends Dmitri Kabalevsky’s requiem for the Second World War. We know we ought to remember — but how do you remember something you’ve never seen? Our imaginations are limited, we who have the good fortune never to have been to war. We do have certain tools to hand, however: war novels, memoirs, poems and films — and, perhaps most affecting, war requiems, those songs of lamentation for lost generations.

Traditionally, the requiem was a form of mass intended to commend an individual to the Almighty, seeking a congenial afterlife for the dead soul. (The term comes from the mass’s first sung word: Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine: Grant eternal rest, O Lord.) From the Middle Ages, almost every major composer, from Mozart to Fauré to Brahms, had tried his hand; by the end of the 19th century, more than 2,000 formal musical masses had been written.

And yet the form seemed insufficient to deal with the carnage of the 20th century. Composers who lived through one or both world wars jettisoned the traditional requiem's decorous music, its redemption-promising words. Their pieces were not about the death of one individual, but, as the age required, the loss of many thousands. Most, like Kabalevsky, unhinged the form from its religious moorings. If God were dead, as many of the century’s witnesses suspected, why bother to seek heaven for the fallen? Instead of setting their music to the Latin and Greek words of the mass, the composers largely opted for bleak poetry written by soldiers. Some of the songsmiths wrote pretty, elegiac tunes, still working within the classical tradition. Others abandoned the past methods, saying, as the title of one First World War novel suggested, “Goodbye to all that.”

English tenor and organist Peter Pears sings at the rehearsal for the 1962 premiere of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem at Coventry Cathedral. Photo Erich Auerbach/Getty Images.

To commemorate Remembrance Day, here are several key 20th-century requiems, fragments of requiems and other musical laments.

Dona Nobis Pacem, Ralph Vaughan Williams
Vaughan Williams, a veteran of the war to end all wars, was writing this piece in the run-up to the Second World War, unable to believe that Europe had moved so soon back to the brink. To accompany his piece, Vaughan Williams selects poems by Walt Whitman (a paramedic in the American Civil War) and words from the funerary mass. When Whitman seeks to convey battles by mentioning bugles and drums, Vaughan Williams reproduces them at deafening volumes, with frightful organ music underneath; when the poet softly laments the death in one melee of both a father and son (in his Dirge for Two Veterans), the composer creates a dignified lament, the last gasp of the traditional European requiem genre. (The Toronto Symphony Orchestra selected this piece for its Remembrance Day concerts this year.)

War Requiem, Benjamin Britten
This was the first music heard in the reconsecrated Coventry Cathedral in 1962. Unlike other pieces written about past wars (say, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture or Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory), there is no jingoistic celebration of victory in Britten’s piece. Minor keys outnumber the majors; dissonance competes with harmony. A pacifist, the English composer attempted to fill the three principal roles with singers from the nations he felt suffered the greatest losses in the Second World War: Germany, Russia and England. For the libretto, Britten (like Vaughan Williams) mixed words from the traditional Catholic mass with the poetry of Wilfred Owen, an English soldier who died a week before the close of the First World War. At the top of the score, Britten quoted the first two lines of an Owen poem: “My subject is war, and the pity of war / The poetry is in the pity…”

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young, Mychael Danna
Another riff on Owen's verse, this one by the eminent film composer. The piece, which was featured in Regeneration, Gillies MacKinnon’s 1999 film about two First World War poets, leads with Owen’s poem of the same name. The poem retells the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, only in this version, “the old man slew his son / and half the seed of Europe, one by one.” Danna has ominous drums of war beat through the verse reading; when the poem ends, he introduces a sole violin, playing high above stately processional music, as if the violin represented the chief mourner leading a sombre parade.

Requiem, Dmitri Kabalevsky
This one is seldom performed, because Kabalevsky thrived in the Soviet period by currying favour with the Communist party and ignoring its excesses. His bad politics didn’t affect his good art. In one memorable aria, some of Russia’s 34 million war dead (27 million civilians, seven million soldiers) come back to earth. “Listen, it is us speaking,” the men’s chorus sings, at first softly, and then with ever-increasing volume, booming out like Volga boatmen. “Above the fields where we lie buried, our voices carry through the quiet. We have forgotten how the poplar murmurs, and the earth, what is it like without us?” I once saw the piece performed at a theatre in Leningrad (as it was then known) on “Victory Over the Fascists Day.” The crowd, some of whom were survivors of the city’s brutal two-year siege by the Nazis, knew, positively knew, that the dead were visiting.

Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. Photo Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

The score to Alexander Nevsky, Sergei Prokofiev
Prokofiev’s score for the Sergei Eisenstein film served simultaneously as a requiem for the eponymous medieval warrior-czar and a call to Russia to prepare for the Second World War. The trumpet sounds, the drums bang and the choir urges, “Arise to arms, ye Russian folk, in the fight to the death, arise ye people fair and brave.” Often performed during wartime, Prokofiev’s piece is thought to distill the stalwart martial spirit of the roused Russian people.

The Quartet for the End of Time, Olivier Messiaen
This piece was written in a German POW camp and first presented in 1941. Its composer, the French pianist Olivier Messiaen, later noted that it was performed “on a cello with only three strings.” Messiaen went on to say that “there was an audience of 5,000 prisoners, from the most diverse classes of society. There were farmers, factory workers, intellectuals, professional servicemen, doctors…. Never before have I been listened to with such attention.” An amateur ornithologist, Messiaen has his instruments imitate birdsong throughout the piece, to symbolize hope that is almost, but not entirely, quenched.

Concerto Funebre, Karl Amadeus Hartmann
The Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony has chosen to perform this requiem on Remembrance Day in Guelph, Ont., this year. The German composer was resolutely (and publicly) anti-Nazi, refusing to allow any of his work to be performed while Hitler was in power; he spent the war under house arrest. Hartmann dedicated this requiem to the victims of Dachau, sending the music abroad to be performed during the war in order to publicize the situation in the camps.

Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, Krzysztof Penderecki
As hellish a piece of music as has ever been written. “When she hears the opening, my young daughter says she thinks it’s evil,” says Victor Sawa, conductor of the Regina Symphony Orchestra. The kid’s right. The violins squeal with just half-tones separating them, like pre-stabbing music in a horror film. Gradually, they quiet, and the 52 strings begin to swarm, like crickets and cicadas anticipating a storm. Then the instruments imitate air-raid sirens. The piece never leaves this ominous territory. There is no denouement. Penderecki makes no attempt to imitate the bomb’s detonation. The sound is inimitable.

Requiem for a Charred Skull, Bramwell Tovey
Tovey’s day job is conducting the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. In 1999, in response to the genocide and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, he was inspired to write Requiem for a Charred Skull. Instead of using poetry to accompany his music, Tovey opted for the words of the traditional funerary mass. Says Tovey, “I was searching far and wide for a text that would have a comparable dramatic impact to the Requiem, but the traditional mass kept coming back to me with its simple, paradoxical message of terror and trust in the final judgment.” A brass band — not the usual orchestra — accompanies the choir. (The recording by the Hannaford Street Silver Band and the Amadeus Choir won a Juno.) Throughout the piece, Tovey maintains a fine balance between hope for the new millennium and despair at the century that has passed. “The final note, Lux, Latin for light, is deliberately ambiguous,” he says.

Alec Scott is a Toronto writer.

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