War Requiem

There are works that are not merely heard but breathed, suffered and, ultimately, become a gesture of collective memory.

Benjamin Britten's War Requiem brings together the Latin text of the Requiem Mass with the poems of Wilfred Owen, a young poet who fell during the First World War. Between these two registers unfolds a tension that is moral rather than military: maintaining humanity in the face of horror. The work was conceived to open a lucid wound in the collective conscience, rather than to provoke a fleeting emotion.

Jonathan Nott conducts this production in his first gesture as music director of the Liceu, with an attentive reading to detail that does not forgo the dramatic breath of the score. Three elements converge in this production: a massive chorus that embodies the voice of the people, a children's choir of fragile, luminous sound, and the soloists, who take on the intimate drama of the individual trapped in the tragedy.

The work offers no easy consolation. Britten sets the fallen enemies in dialogue and shows the fragility of certainties, but he lets a small crack of humanity show through that persists even in the darkest night. It is a reflective proposal about war and about the need to imagine a different future.