Coventry Cathedral and Britten's War Requiem

Coventry Cathedral; “War Requiem”

The middle weeks of November 2018 have been given over to the centenary of the WW1 Armistice. What  sort of commemoration? Sombre pride at worthwhile sacrifice, or sombre bitterness at a colossal waste, or a sombre mixture of contradictory responses?

It was an apposite time to visit Coventry Cathedral, a vast memorial of conflict (the old Cathedral destroyed by bombing in WW2; the new one built adjacent to the former’s ruins). It is also an apposite time to hear Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem,commissioned for the dedication of Coventry’s new Cathedral. The themes of Cathedral and Requiem are different; even somewhat opposed.

The first thought that many people have when visiting Coventry is – why didn’t they rebuild the old Cathedral? Bombing and shelling in both World Wars destroyed countless churches in the UK and Europe. Most have been meticulously rebuilt (for example, Wren churches in the City of London, churches in Germany, the cathedral in Vienna). Coventry Cathedral lost its roof and inner arches, but retained its walls in recognisable shape. Its Tower is intact. It would have been possible to rebuild.

But here starts a journey to a shrine of commemoration. Let the ruins stand as bombed, it was decided – still part of the overall “Cathedral”. Let us build a new, reverently contiguous structure to stand for something new, something hopeful, after the destruction of war.

So up went the new church in the 1950s (architect Basil Spence). It’s a big warehouse shed of a building, in itself without much character, ancient or modern. What it does boast is a couple massive pieces of modern art – the tapestry of Christ by Graham Sutherland and the floor-to-roof stained glass window by Piper. These, each in its own way impressive, don’t really speak to each other (they are set at opposite ends of the building, at right angles to one another).

Although both are huge artefacts, they are also rather forlorn. To one standing at the end of the new Cathedral adjacent to the old, the tapestry is a distant area of colour amidst the gloom, on the wall behind the long concrete High Altar (which reminds one of a very basic railway platform).

The Piper glass is also an irruption into the otherwise utilitarian sombreness of the building.

One wonders what’s serving what: are the spectacular works enhancing the church, or is the church just a container for the works? There is no binding artistic or spiritual relationship between the art and the building, as there is in the best of churches built from medieval times to the C20.

The main purpose of the new Cathedral (and the old ruins) is to preserve and create images and spaces to showcase a concern with forgiveness and reconciliation.

Forgiveness and reconciliation are virtues not to be disparaged – but there is something relentless in the many ways the message is pushed here: inscriptions and chapels, crosses of charred wood and iron nails, crowns of thorns. 

The ruins of the old are poignant and freighted with meanings that do need to be made explicit.

But the spaces and symbols of the modern Cathedral don’t (as with the
rest of it) really cohere and are in many cases to be found darkish corners of its vast space.

The one exception is the tepee-like structure of the non-denominational Chapel of Unity, which put me in mind of an early prototype design for the interior of Dr Who’s Tardis.

And so to Britten, who had his War Requiem first performed in the new Cathedral. The Requiemcombines the words of a traditional Latin Mass for the Dead with the WW1 poetry of Wilfred Owen. 

There is little Piety (as found in the Cathedral), but much Pity (Owen’s poetic purpose). The Cathedral’s theme is a reaching out, in forgiveness, former aerial aggressors to former aerial aggressors, former victims to former victims. 

Britten’s/Owen’s theme is a shared, catastrophic, brutal, impersonal madness. This is the fit with the Mass: a wrathful Last Judgment before which all of mankind, or at least most of European mankind, quakes with guilt – whilst the world, or much of it, dissolves in fire, and Abraham disobediently slays his son “and half the seed of Europe, one by one”.

Britten called his Requiem a ”reparation”. One could take this mean that the artistic creation fused out of the poetry, the Mass and the music is offered as payment (however incommensurate) for the grotesque fact of WW1, perhaps of all wars (Britten was a pacifist).

Britten’s is not a theme of reconciliation, except in the admission of shared futility and waste in the last of the Owen poems set in the piece, when two adversaries meet after death.

The English National Opera production of the Requiem was notable for turning the choirs into an operatic chorus (unsurprising perhaps, given the Company). Some critics have found this irritating or even banal. I found it ingenious and fairly affecting. But this being my first “live” Requiem I had nothing visually to compare it with.

However the back projections that were an integral part of the production were a different matter: a very mixed bag.  Some anodyne cute close ups of Coventry’s ruins were all very well; reproductions from an illustrated and very hard hitting 1920s German anti war book were apposite to Britten’s sympathies. But a sudden reference (complete with website address) to a massacre during the 1990s Bosnian conflict seemed inapposite, raising unanswered questions about the role of Pity and of Reparation (let alone Forgiveness and Reconciliation) in the case of genocidal massacre.

That is another category of violence, not addressed by Coventry, or by Owen, or by the Requiem.

November 2018