Spring 1999
Volume 25, Number 3

This is an essay out of time. It treats a cathedral and a Latin requiem, yet finds the pair not sprouting up in some comfortably appropriate medieval setting but rather proffered before the English public in 1962. And it evokes an England of that decade not blossoming in cultural transformation as we might tend to imagine it--mods and teddy boys, David Hockney and R. B. Kitaj, Blow-Up and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band--but rather one closer in period spirit, if not in comic tone and Edwardian style, to the world of P. G. Wodehouse.

It is also an essay somewhat out of place within our own current scholarly debates. Given an intellectual climate in which most works of cultural analysis engage either the central icons of high art (conservatively defended or radically revisited) or the ostensibly subversive artifacts generated at the margins of race, class, and gender, both Basil Spence's safely modernist cathedral and Benjamin Britten's reassuringly topical requiem present the unthreatening, and thus unpromising, mien of the stolid middle class. (I will not be addressing Britten's gayness, which has recently generated a revisionist body of scholarship on the composer, if not on the requiem itself.) Even more suspect than its dwelling on the cultural median, this article commits the academic sin of taking as its subject, of taking seriously, the question of religious faith.

Ultimately, I believe, this essay does indeed engage issues of contemporary importance; but I sense (and my early readers assure me) that it would be a mistake to entrust that matter entirely to the reader's faith, to your willingness to persevere with me to the end. Thus a few prefatory words concerning what this article is and is not about. It is not meant to reclaim into the canon of academic art history a neglected architectural monument, nor to revalorize a work of music that continues to enjoy a certain renown (though the piece does suffer from infrequent performance, owing to the difficulty of the score and the complex personnel demanded by the large ensemble). The project is also not an argument in favor of faith in general, nor--God forbid--some personal religious quest on the part of this particular author. Rather, the article juxtaposes musical work against architectural edifice primarily as a heuristic device, for the sake of discovering a fundamental interdependence between faith and its seeming opposite, skepticism. I will be arguing that the two stances, each fully realized, may constitute much the same thing: no (good) faith without skepticism, and certainly no skepticism without faith. And that conclusion entails consequences much beyond the theological realm. It has epistemic implications, for instance, when hermeneutics (itself a word of theological derivation) and semiology emerge as less than antagonistic activities; and ontological ones, when the real and representation likewise lose much of their antipodal charge. In such issues, not in faith, lie my true passions.

Church

And so it came to pass. Following the usual rounds of hopes and false starts, of failed commissions and contentious architectural competitions, of journalistic polemics and ecclesiastical bickerings, of New World fundraising and town council machinations, in May of 1962 a new Coventry cathedral [{fig. 1}] welcomed to its consecration Queen Elizabeth II, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and (through the media) the eyes and ears of a grateful Christian kingdom. 1 This cathedral, the decade-long work of architect Basil Spence, did not so much replace the destroyed structure as augment it. Shunning the plans of competing designers to build within the surviving walls or on top of their cleared foundations, Spence chose to preserve the open-air ruins as a monument to the sacrifices of the past. His modernist edifice instead extended northward from an opening cut in the bar tracery of the old cathedral's surviving ambulatory wall, its own "east" altar now at the far north end of the L-shaped site [{fig. 2}]. An itinerary that wended from the old to the new would follow the eastward line of the exposed former nave to the erstwhile location of the high altar (beyond which one could see, installed in the destroyed apse, the so-called Charred Cross, nailed together from salvaged timbers), then turn abruptly to the left; traverse the blasted shell to enter a newly constructed porch; pass through the enormous cut-glass, south-facing "west" wall of Spence's cathedral (by intent transparent but certainly, when struck by sunlight from the south, opaque as steel); and then proceed toward the new altar of hammered concrete to the north, behind which presided, in the world's largest tapestry, stretching seventy-two feet in height, Graham Sutherland's rendition of Christ seated in glory against a field of emerald green [(fig. 3)]. A path, then, from ruins to renewal.

Requiem

Suddenly, the angelic voices of boys. In many churches this juvenile choir would have perched high in the rear balcony to achieve celestial effect, but at Coventry cathedral--for whose consecration the War Requiem was commissioned and where the piece received its premiere performance on the evening of 30 May 1962--the uninterrupted expanse of the great glass "west" wall precluded such literal elevation. "Te decet hymnus, Deus in Sion," these ephemeral yet clarion tongues beckon from beyond the divide separating humanity from the eternal peace that will reign after the Last Judgment, "Thou shalt have praise in Zion, oh God." The tritone, to be sure, has not been banished from these heavenly spheres; each phrase of the boys' unison chorus begins or ends with alternating Cs and F-sharps, while their final, evenly paced chant splits the voices into these same two notes (the first and second violins from the orchestra, moreover, alternate in sustaining the two notes of the tritone throughout the beatific interlude). A different valence for the atonal dyad, however, emerges here. The boys' phrases themselves are markedly chromatic; the first two, for instance, each exclude only one note--and each phrase a different one--from the full twelve-tone chromatic scale. The evanescent timbre of a harmonium accompanying the boys may hold diatonic triads, but does so only by systematically passing through all twelve tones of the full chromatic series. Coupled with the rhythmic regularity of the boys' line, this tonal homogeneity grants to the empyrean chorus an aura of timeless stability.

This, then, would seem to be the true dialectic forwarded by the opening passages of the War Requiem: not the contrast between full choir and orchestra but between those two as a collective entity and the boys' choir with harmonium. The juxtaposition, moreover, offers all the clarity of a polemic. Against the striving of a humanity uncertain of its absolution, the certitude of eternal salvation rings forth. Against the dramatic movement of the orchestra searching out tonal resolutions and the dissonance voiced by its accompanying choir, the boys arrest forward development toward a cadence--as if superseding the rules of harmony, represented in each of the harmonium's diatonic triads--through the extraordinary stability offered by the homogeneous twelve-tone scale.3 This differentiation between conflict in the human realm and its cessation in celestial spheres employs the same hortatory rhetoric that underlies Britten's Latin source text. The various movements of Missa pro defunctis, centered on the theme of the Last Judgment, set off the articulation of anguished uncertainty in anticipation of that moment of truth faced by all when the trumpets sound (Dies irae, Libera me) against the proclamation of divine glory awaiting only the blessed (Sanctus). The tritone, on its own, thematizes the dynamic: unstable and stable at the same moment, this dyad represents both the temporal act of striving and the atemporal state of that which is sought.

But Britten's requiem will not leave us be with this comfortably hoary formulation of faith. Following a reprise of the main choir's supplication with its accompanying orchestral dirge, a chamber orchestra of twelve players, conducted by Britten himself during the premiere, strikes up a martial cadence. One can all but see the English lads in fatigues and puttees rushing off in a hunched, double-time march to the chaos of the front (evoked by the general cacophony of the chamber orchestra), as "wailing shells" (imitated by the high woodwinds) fly overhead and the "stuttering rifles' rapid rattle" (replicated in the staccatos of the double reeds and the snare drum's tattoo) takes its toll. The words in quotation marks are by Wilfred Owen, poet-martyr of the Great War, and a solo tenor sings their strain.4 Line by line, Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth" mocks the rituals--prayers and bells, candles and flowers--of religious mourning. These soldiers, destined to die, will never know of the miraculous mutation, promised by the church, of impermanent body into eternal spirit ("ad te omnis caro veniet," sing the boys; "all flesh shall come before Thee"); instead, their flesh is mere flesh, as men perish "as cattle." ("Was it for this the clay grew tall?" the tenor will ask later in the War Requiem, with words from Owen's "Futility"; "--O what made fatuous sunbeams toil / To break earth's sleep at all?") The tritone, earlier the emblem of the drama of salvation, appears again here, but it has lost its power to enact any such spiritual transcendence. The brief but recurring tritone tremolo in the harp, recalling the earlier chimes accompanying the main choir, marks out not the measured gait of a religious procession but rather the quick pace of the military march. At the end of his passage the tenor repeats the same eleven-tone melodic line beginning in C and ending in F-sharp initially sung by the boys, but does so to the words "And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds," directly countering the main choir's earlier plea of "et lux perpetua luceat eis"--"And let the perpetual light shine upon them." Beneath the tenor a bass drum played by snare sticks captures the unending, mind-numbing rumble of artillery. The tritone, in short, no longer signals the moral affliction of human expiation, nor can it evoke the divine timelessness of chromatic equilibrium; it speaks instead of the interminable, and all too mundane, agony of men in battle.

In one sense, then, the dynamics of the War Requiem appear more tripartite than bipartite: all too terrestrial troops, a heavenly host, and a congregation of supplicants entreating the transportation of the doomed former into the timeless realm of the latter. Except that, when confronted with the tenor singing in contemporary English about the modern engines of slaughter, the ageless spiritual matters expressed by the Latin mass--articulated by both the main choir and the boys' chorus--fade from immediate concern, becoming quite remote indeed. Why all this Latin fuss about whether or not one will be saved when--as the lines from Owen imply--the mechanisms of salvation may, at the very least in the modern era, simply not exist? The main choir and the boys alike declare an investment in a sacred program that the disturbing English poetry deems played out, bankrupt. Thus a dialectic in the War Requiem reemerges, but it has evolved yet again. No longer a dialogue between the penitent and the saved, the piece has become a dispute between the distant ethereal spirit and the proximate tragedy of earthbound armed conflict. Where Spence's plan had a cathedral rise out of the ashes of war, Britten's requiem allowed the ashes of war to issue out again from the new cathedral.

Faith

Spence's building would appear to realize, in stone and glass, these ideals of social reconciliation and religious ecumenicalism. The designated themes of its two large, semidetached chapels certainly contributed to the message. At the Chapel of Christ the Servant the "industrial chaplains" dedicated themselves to the amelioration of labor relations in this Midlands factory town, while the Chapel of Unity (as Spence described it, "shaped like a Crusader's tent, as Christian Unity is a modern Crusade" [quoted in RR, p. 45]) housed the effort to impel the Church of England and other Christian denominations (excepting the Roman Catholics, who chose not to participate) toward a "World Church" ideally joining all of Christendom.6 So, too, the materials chosen for building bespoke ecumenical ambitions. Not only did items incorporated into the edifice arrive in Coventry from around the globe--a mosaic floor from Sweden, a baptismal font from Bethlehem, a symbolic stone from Kiel--but also the sheer variety of stuff crafted together to construct the cathedral--pink-gray sandstone for the exterior walls and textured white plaster for the inside, slender columns of reinforced concrete and a canopy of spruce slats, black marble floor and wooden clergy stalls, the cut-glass "west" wall and many sets of stained-glass windows, a flèche in aluminum alloy, and of course the giant tapestry--demanded a degree of skilled workmanship and a coordination of artisanal effort that evoked the fondest projections of mid nineteenth-century aesthetic-social theorists of the likes of Ruskin and Morris.

1. The tale of the destruction of the old cathedral and the building of the new has been told from a variety of points of view: from the perspective of the architect in Basil Spence, Phoenix at Coventry: The Building of a Cathedral (London, 1962); from that of the clergy in R. T. Howard, Ruined and Rebuilt: The Story of Coventry Cathedral, 1939Ð1962 (Letchworth, 1962), hereafter abbreviated RR, and H. C. N. Williams, Coventry Cathedral (Norwich, [1962?]); and with the hindsight of art historical reconstruction in Louise Campbell, Coventry Cathedral: Art and Architecture in Post-War Britain (Oxford, 1996).

2. My analysis of the musical structure of Britten's mass is indebted to the following musicological sources: Mervyn Cooke, Britten: War Requiem (Cambridge, 1996); Peter Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten (Minneapolis, 1979); and Anthony Milner, "The Choral Music," in The Britten Companion, ed. Christopher Palmer (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 329Ð45.
Throughout this article I quote from the text of the War Requiem exactly as it is printed.

3. On a more technical level (which I would never have perceived without Margaret Murata's expert guidance), the repeated cycle of the harmonium's twelve diatonic triads implies an authentic cadence when the C major dominant at the end of each series resolves to the F major tonic at the beginning of the next (and a second similar, though less regular, cadence when at the midpoint of the series an F-sharp major triad resolves to a B minor chord). Yet by the end of the boys' interlude such diatonic cadential relationships give way to alternating F major and B minor chords, which have C and F-sharp, sung by the boys, as their perfect fifths. Once again, the chromatic symmetry of the tritone supersedes the imperatives of diatonic resolution.

4. It appears that in composing the War Requiem, Britten copied--and at points altered -- Owen's verse from the volume in his personal library, The Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. Edmund Blunden (1931; London, 1955). Again, throughout this essay I will be quoting from the texts exactly as they appear in the early pages of the authorized score.

5. Williams, Twentieth Century Cathedral (London, 1964), p. 6; hereafter abbreviated TC.

6. Spence, Phoenix at Coventry, p. 115.