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Let down by Britten

Robin Holloway

Wednesday, 26th November 2008

Caught by chance on Remembrance Sunday, the broadcast of the composer’s celebrated recording of War Requiem kept me hooked, listening with half an ear, half fascinated, half repelled, for the whole duration of a trip down memory lane, recalling the wave of patriotic fervour and heart-on-sleeve emotion surrounding the work’s première, 1962, in the new Coventry cathedral. This was relayed live; I was invited, in my first undergraduate year at Cambridge, to join an awed group huddled together in the room of a fellow student possessed of superior sound equipment and partake (though inwardly demurring before and during the pious experience). Shattering to my contemporaries, it was for my callow self merely the latest in a line of overrated let-downs by Benjamin Britten — the ultimate produce of an inadvertent master-provider (cold mutton dressed up as sacrificial lamb) to the Establishment; representative right-thinking/leftish middle/muddle, soft-centre, wet liberalism. The dissentient voice was not well received.

Nor was the work possible to evade thereafter. Two years later Britten himself was in Cambridge for a triumphal performance: and the instant old masterpiece was the obligatory set work in the final exams. My mind didn’t change then; and ever since I’ve managed to avoid the War Requiem for all its ubiquity. So how would it seem after some 45 years’ abstention? Every note still etched on the reluctant memory (that set work!), and still resented for its didactic bossiness, high-minded ethical uplift, and moral/artistic blackmail (if not moved to the depths, you’re an unfeeling sub-human jingoist). Above all — and this wasn’t callow back in 1962 — for its deficiencies in real compositional calibre and invention (judged, too, by the most appropriate standards, its composer’s own).

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