ESSAY // SANCTUS: DIVINE REVELATION
‘No Peaceful Dreams’
On conscientious objection and Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem
by Spencer Lane Jones
EXCERPT //
On the night of November 14, 1940, the Luftwaffe bombed Coventry, England, destroying the Church of England’s Coventry Cathedral in the process. It took two decades to redesign and rebuild the church, and in 1962, Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem debuted there to mark and bless the cathedral’s reconsecration.
Britten’s score was unique, and not universally beloved. It combined the traditional Latin text of the Requiem Mass with poetry by Wilfred Owen, England’s poet-martyr who died in France a week before the Armistice in 1918. Synthesizing the modern and the medieval in classical music had not been done before, and the marriage was not obvious. Leonard Bernstein, profoundly influenced by Britten’s work, said the composer was “a man at odds with the world. On the surface his music would seem to be decorative, positive, charming... if you really hear it, you become aware of something very dark.” Bernstein was unsettled by the sound: “There are gears that are grinding and not quite meshing and they make a great pain.”
When World War II broke out in 1939, Britten left England as a conscientious objector, taking his talents to the U.S. to compose operas in New York. In 1945, he traveled to northern Germany to play music for survivors at Bergen-Belsen. His encounters with the still-living, as well as the footage he saw of Nazi atrocities committed in his immediate surroundings, haunted him and his music for the rest of his life. At Bergen-Belsen, he is said to have wondered about the rightness of his choice to leave Europe as its people descended into the hell of war. Years later, he said that music and its creators had a duty: “To be useful, and to the living.” Among historians, it remains a matter of debate if Britten’s pacifism was absolute.
Conscientious objection is a kind of righteous absence. It is abandonment, virtuous and principled in the objector’s mind. But there is always a would-be comrade who feels himself forsaken. If total war in the face of totalitarianism made objection morally questionable, subsequent decades of aimless, outsourced wars have made it overly romantic, perhaps even archaic.
Today, American soldiers are stationed in eight hundred military bases around the world, and they engage in counterterrorism missions in 85 countries. There are upwards of 1,200 government organizations and 1,900 private companies serving counterterrorism, domestic security, and intelligence programs across the country, employing more than 800,000 people. Circa 2020, there were twice as many private contractors as U.S. soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan. In Washington, DC, the intelligence and surveillance complexes built after September 2001 occupy the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitol buildings. We accept more state power and surveillance than any previous American generation.
When American soldiers invaded Iraq in 2003, my sixth grade social studies teacher put a newspaper under the overhead projector’s dull light, thinking the time was right to teach us how to read critically, how to separate truth from fact from conjecture. Twenty years later, in my sixth year teaching high school history, I was standing at the industrial printer getting materials ready for 80 ninth-graders when I got a notification that American soldiers were being withdrawn from Afghanistan. By the time the machine finished spitting out its products, my phone was pushing images of chaos, futility, and failure.
In all that time, moving from classroom to classroom to classroom, leaving my home state and going to another, then another and another and another, then coming home again to teach, no one I encountered offered new language appropriate for describing what had happened—what was happening and is still happening. If not “total war,” what is it? //
For full text and images, consider reading RQ in print, on a Sunday afternoon, sun streaming through your window, coffee in hand, and nary a phone alert within sight or in earshot… just fine words, fine design, and the opportunity to make a stitch in time. // Subscribe or buy a single issue today. // Print is dead. Long live print. //