Great War Symphony at the Royal Albert Hall

Royal Albert Hall – Great War Symphony

There was a strange concert at the Royal Albert Hall in early October, at times moving but often disconcerting. It was a programme of music marking the end of WW1, including a new choral symphony composed by the conductor for the evening, Patrick Hawes.

There have been many ways of reflecting artistically on the events of 1914-18. The two predominant sets of themes are superficially in opposition. On the one hand, there’s the Commemorative, emphasizing Heroism, Sacrifice, Nobility – and great Sorrow. On the other, the Horrified, emphasizing Slaughter, Futility, grim Stoicism – and Pity and Anger. 

The former has left the greater mark in the public realm. Its lasting monuments are the cemeteries, the Menin Gate at Ypres, the Cenotaph and, above all, in France and the UK, the countless war memorials to be found in every town and village. The essential message is: we remember the fallen with honour, and that they have not died in vain.

But turn to certain poets (Wilfred Owen traditionally heads the list), artists (Nash, Levinson) and memoirists (Graves, Sassoon, Blunden) and one finds a different conclusion: that the War was a grotesque event, a vast and senseless slaughter – from which warnings may be taken but no comforting glory.

Benjamin Britten’s 1961 War Requiem is the musical embodiment of the second tradition, setting many of Owen’ most anguished poems (“What passing- bells for these who die as cattle…”). The Albert Hall concert was squarely in the more patriotic tradition.

The ensemble was vast. It comprised a full orchestra, four choirs, solo singers and no less than three groups of military musicians – fanfareists from the RAF, drummers from the Marines and, most imposingly, the Band of the Household Cavalry, conducted from the stalls by a grand looking officer. Such were the numbers of the musical soldiers, taking up ranks at the forefront and sides of the stage, in full pageant pomp, that they often eclipsed (in near literal sense) the conventional performers. 

In the peripheral light at the edges of the stage, the cavalry, in their red-plumed helmets, often looked like a menacing contingent of Spartan warriors, on their way to defy and die at Thermopylae. At that battle there was indeed great sacrifice for a honourable and eventually successful end.

After a somewhat Last-Night-of-the Proms first half, well executed, with much pomp and circumstance in places, came The Great War Symphony. Like Britten before him, Hawes has set to music poems (including some Owen). But, as already mentioned, his theme is different from Britten’s (and Owen’s).

Hawes says that he takes as his guide the inscription on the war grave of his great uncle: “He lies with England’s heroes, in the watchful care of God”. Hawes adds: “..despite their loss – or rather because of it- our lives are much freer and richer. I really believe they didn’t die for nothing”. And Hawes also quotes, and sets in his symphony, a poem by Rupert Brooke:

Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,

Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.

Honour has come back, as a king to earth..

Some contrast to Owen’s poem Dulce et Decorum Est [It is Sweet and Fitting], of a gassing victim:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the  froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

And here is Britten, a pacifist, writing about his Requiem: “I hope it will make people think”. And on the manuscript of the Requiem he wrote Owen’s words:

My subject is War, and the pity of War.

The poetry is in the pity..

All a poet can do today is warn.

The commemorative tradition in which Hawes’s work lies was perhaps very necessary in the War’s aftermath, in the attempt to bind the nation’s great psychic wound – to make sense of the senseless. More cynically, it was necessary to portray a sorrowing but grateful nation, united behind the politicians and generals that led the commemorations – the Cenotaph solemnities (continuing to this day), thus deflecting, to some extent, the ghastly burden of guilt that the leaders bore, or should have borne.

And, after all, if bravery and stoicism amount to honour, there was plenty of that to remember.

For me, the Symphonywas a little marred by an accompanying montage of contemporary newsreel footage. Although individually many of the scenes were moving or distressing, the whole amounted to a series of clichés: starting with a pre-war glimpse peaceful urban scenes, cricket on the village green, FA cup final…moving through enthusiastic recruitment drives, arrival in France, swashbuckling charges; then the mud, huge artillery barrages, the burial of the dead; before ending with the Cenotaph and views of the endless graves in the War Cemeteries. 

It was film editing by numbers.

At the end of Hawes’s piece there was a (mostly) standing ovation. 

Britten forbade any applause at all at the end of the Requiem.

Oct 1018