All right!  You've convinced me, Mary! I will buy it too!  Or to be more precise: it's going straight to my list of 'Things to buy on receiving my first pay check'.  It's €25 on the continent!

Thank you, Oliver.  It shouldn't bother me, really.  And it's true: there are enough places where Britten is harmonically adventurous.

Very much interested in your thoughts, Swan_Knight.

For me,the War Requiem is the classic case of what I feel is the unevenness of Britten's music between 'Billy Budd'and 'Death in Venice'.

In a good performance it is intensely moving and creates a sense of occasion,and for this I think he must be given credit.He wreaks a kind of alchemy with his audience,and that is  something to reckon with,I think.

BUt I feel a great difference between the best and the weaker pasages which comesout more on repeated listening.  The 'Anthem for Doomed Youth'and 'At A Calvary near the Ancre' are I think the best passages,but too many of the latin sections sound derivative,and the Sanctus I feel is frankly scratching for ideas.  The Offertorium begins wonderfully, Britten at his best,but the 'Quam Olim Abraham'is too long and  uninspired.

I know he felt he wrote best under pressure,and I was astonished to read what short deadlines he set himself,which makes the result miraculous in many cases.But I can't help feeling he'd have done better to take more time. Iknow comparisons are odious,but Vaughan Williams  would have spent about five years on a work of this scale, producing extensive piano scores  of whole moveemnts and then discard them or re-compose them entirely after long consideration.

I suppose one could say the financial and critical reward of the War Requiem could hardly have been higher for a serious classical work in the mid -sixities,  but I can't help thinking  posterity will regard him in much the same way as Liszt or Anthony Trollope.

Was it the piece or the performance he thought was awful, though, eru?

Re subversiveness, it's a generally overused term (or even an overused concept?). Why didn't you ask Bill Mival what he meant at the time?

I think it has some subversive elements, certainly for its time. For one thing, it treats all participants in the war as of equal value, which in the British patriotism that surrounded the two world wars was a very unusual thing to do, and would have shocked many. Britten's eternal rest, if any, is for both sides. Also, in "disrupting" (Donald Mitchell's word) the text of the requiem mass with the poems, which tell of war in all its grim reality, it is basically criticising the platitudes of the Christian liturgy. This is carefully (though angrily) done. The innocence of the boys' voices singing of prayer and the will of God is disrupted by "What passing bells for these who die as cattle?", the truth of the matter. The seed of Abraham is "the seed of Europe" being killed "one by one". When the boys sing of "hostias and preces"  (sacrifices and prayers) being offered to God, they do so just after Owen's bitter version of the story of Abraham and Isaac, where Isaac is not saved. The most obvious example of "subversion" - and remember this piece was for performance in a cathedral - is the use in the Agnus Dei of "One ever hangs where shelled roads part",  where  not only is the image of Christ shattered by man's violence (ours? theirs? who knows?) but also priests are openly criticised. (Near Golgotha strolls many a priest/ And in their faces there is pride /That they were flesh marked by the Beast/ By whom the gentle Christ's denied) . These very angry words are set against the choir singing a gentle Agnus Dei. At the end of this section Britten actually alters the text of the Requiem Mass by interpolating "Dona nobis Pacem", which does not appear in a requiem. This should be the high point of the performance.

I think it is this moment and the use of the poems, where they are placed, that is the subversive element. Otherwise, it is a fairly conventional, though very effective, setting of the Requiem Mass, which rarely breaks new ground and can seem quite derivative - the debt to Verdi is certainly there, though I'm sure Britten was well aware of that. The use of the tritone - frequently close to the word "requiem" - is interesting, and I am personally very fond of the "Pleni sunt coeli" - the free muttering that sounds like angels' wings. It's another place where the form seems so right that it's hard to believe it hadn't been done before in this context - but it hadn't.

Some people still don't "get" it. It's seen by some, astonishingly, as being in the line of conventionl sorrow and gratitude for sacrifices made, a lament for the dead.(I'm sure I read of an American performance where it was actually done in a military remembrance context.) Well, it's an angry lament that accepts nothing as inevitable, and it is grateful for nothing.

Can I beg that we don't get into an argument about pacifism, please?

It helps a lot if you know what the Latin text actually means. I notice that in the vocal score there's no translation, which means that a heck of a lot of singers will have no idea what they're singing about, unless they have a conscientious chorus master. Still, if they follow the directions in the score it will work anyway, but they won't get nearly as much out of it.

I think Britten's "Dies Irae" is right here on earth.