Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Losing our religion

James MacMillan’s European Requiem was not about Brexit – it was a requiem for Europe’s Christian civilisation

Sir James MacMillan’s European Requiem, performed at the Proms on Sunday, isn’t about Brexit. The composer had to make this clear in a Radio 3 interview just before the broadcast, because the BBC was just itching to cast the work — a melancholy score, despite its thunderous drumbeats — as a lament for us leaving the EU.

That would have been neat, given that the second half of the concert consisted of Beethoven’s Ninth, whose ‘Ode to Joy’ has been clumsily appropriated by Brussels. Incidentally, some Remainers in the audience chattered through the symphony’s first three movements, impatient for their Big Tune. I don’t know if there were any ancient white Rhodesians in the Albert Hall, but if there were I bet they waited respectfully for their former national anthem: ‘Rise, O voices, of Rhodesia/God may we Thy bounty share …’

But I digress. The European Requiem was written before Brexit — and, in any case, MacMillan doesn’t identify Brussels with ‘Europe’. The piece is a lament, for sure. Rarely has the Latin liturgy sounded so bleak as in its great solos for baritone and counter-tenor, the grief further twisted by MacMillan’s trademark melismas (melodic ornaments stretching over one syllable). But this is a requiem for something much bigger: Europe’s Christian civilisation, made possible only by the arrival of St Peter in Rome.

It’s not, however, a purely religious memorial by the most overtly Catholic major composer since Messiaen. MacMillan was once a very left-wing Scottish socialist; he’s now a conservative who repudiates the Labour party and, even more vehemently, the clownish cultural fascism of the SNP. His European Requiem is inspired by Sir Roger Scruton’s book The Uses of Pessimism (2010), which identifies Christian forgiveness as a source of European freedom and accountability.

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