The University of Chicago Press Critical Inquiry

Bad Faith at Coventry: Spence's Cathedral and Britten's "War Requiem"
Author(s): James D. Herbert

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Spring, 1999), pp. 535-565
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Bad Faith at Coventry: Spence's Cathedral
and Britten's War Requiem
James D. Herbert
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. Pep-
per'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 de-
bates. 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
Like the rebuilding of Coventry cathedral and the premiere of the War Requiem, this
essay is the product of many hands. Martin Donougho, Dan Herbert, Aeron Hunt, and
Sarah Whiting all read the essay and commented with care. Margaret Murata saved me
from many a musicological embarrassment-although undoubtedly still others crept back
in during the revisions. Cecile Whiting deserves much grateful acknowledgment not only
(as always) for serving as my most trusted editor but also (in this particular instance) for
putting up with innumerable secondhand listenings to the War Requiem at volumes she
found simply inexplicable. The extended metaphor of the fractal plane/space developed in
the final section was a collective discovery of the graduate seminar titled "Rhetorics of Real-
ism" that I taught at the University of California, Irvine in the fall of 1997, and I wish to
acknowledge the contribution of the students and colleagues who participated: Luis Avila,
Francesca Bavuso, Fiona Brigstock, Bill Etter, Richard Faulk, Tom Hertenstein, Marina
Ludwigs, April Lynch, and Janice Neri.
Critical Inquiry 25 (Spring 1999)

? 1999 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/99/2503-0005$02.00. All rights reserved.
535
536 James D. Herbert Bad Faith at Coventry
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 aca-
demic 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 im-
portance; 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 en-
semble). The project is also not an argument in favor offaith 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 heu-
ristic 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
On the night of 14 November 1940, the Anglican Cathedral Church

of Saint Michael in Coventry, dating from the fourteenth century but only
elevated in 1918 to the rank of cathedral with its own diocese, fell victim
to the first heavy aerial bombardment inflicted on England during World
War II. Although the factories of this industrial city of the Midlands were
the obvious targets of the Luftwaffe bombers, the ancient wooden beams
supporting the cathedral's vault flared up swiftly under the inexact rain
of incendiary shells. By dawn only the masonry walls and single tower
remained to circle the charred remnants of roof and interior. The des-
ecration of this holy building, along with the death of hundreds in sur-
James D. Herbert is associate professor of art history and graduate

advisor for the Program in Visual Studies at the University of California,
Irvine. His most recent book is Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition (1998).
Critical Inquiry Spring 1999 537
rounding neighborhoods, became ready fodder for propagandists wishing

to nurture the Allied cause; after an uneasy interlude of barely twenty
years, it seemed, the barbaric Hun once again threatened all that was
good about Western civilization. During the war years to follow, the re-
solve voiced by the local clergy on the morn of the conflagration came to
carry great symbolic import for all of the nation. Coventry cathedral
would be rebuilt. The English way of life would survive.
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 fund-
raising 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. From wartime sacrifice
to postwar resurrection. From the crucifixion of our Lord to his redemp-
tion-and "our" salvation.
1. The tale of the destruction of the old cathedral and the building of the new h
been told from a variety of points of view: from the perspective of the architect in B
Spence, Phoenix at Coventry: The Building of a Cathedral (London, 1962); from that of
clergy in R. T Howard, Ruined and Rebuilt: The Story of Coventry Cathedral, 1939-1962 (Let
worth, 1962), hereafter abbreviated RR, and H. C. N. Williams, Coventry Cathedral (N
wich, [1962?]); and with the hindsight of art historical reconstruction in Louise Campb
Coventry Cathedral: Art and Architecture in Post-War Britain (Oxford, 1996).
I
?'
A,,
Io~
c~???-tl~i*agi:i~F"~ u?*
r
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:-LI
!:'PT,:'-? ~:"fi i'-?ii'i

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FIG. 1.-Coventry cathedral, exterior from the east. In H. C. N. Williams, Coventry Cathedral (
21) ji
The Nave The Ruins
Detailed Plan of Coventry Cathedral
1 Bookshop 10 Columns forming Aisles

19 Lady Chapel
2 Tower 11 Lectern 20 Tapestry
3 Porch Archway 12 Pulpit 21 Chapel of Christ in
4 International Centre 13 Tablets of the Word Gethsemane
5 'West' Window 14 Nave Window 22 Chapel of Christ the Servant
6 Chapel of Unity 15 Chancel 23 St Michael's Steps
7 Position of Fldche on Roof 16 Bishop's Throne 24 Roods
8 Font 17 Organ 25 Crypt Chapel Entrances
9 Baptistery Window 18 Altar 26 Refectory
FIG. 2.-Plan of Coventry cathedral (north is left). In H. C. N. Williams, Cov-

entry Cathedral (Norwich, [1962?]), p. 3.
Requiem
"Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine," voices implore in the even

cadence of a monotone chant, "Lord, grant them eternal rest." Chimes
toll a regular rhythm, accentuating the call for divine mercy. A full orches-
tra alternates phrase for phrase with the choir. Entering above a quiet
pedal tone held by the piano, tuba, and timpani, the ensemble insinuates
greater motion, as short sixteenth notes slurred to more sustained quar-
ter notes (often chromatic neighbors) impel the piece forward. The in-
struments, moving together in a near unison of parallel octaves (only the
bassoons and the low brass offer a subdued hint of harmonic structure),
seem intent on reaching some resolution in a cadence; yet without a solid
base in a key (neither the pedal A nor the key signature of one flat provide
meaningful guidance), their wanderings in pitch can never settle on one.
The voices, meanwhile, offer tension trapped in stasis. After an initial
declaration of the words by sopranos and tenors on F-sharp, altos and
basses rearticulate the supplication on C. This pair of notes-repeated
over and again by the antiphonal voices--comprises a tritone. The tri-
tone, which will emerge as a recurring motif unifying the entire eighty-
five minutes of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, derives its name from the
three whole-tone steps it takes along the twelve half-tone notes of the
,....?:..
.:~~r :..:.,
-:;i! i .. . .... . . .........
i ja i
FIG. 3.-
try Chr
Britain
chrom
a disso
tonic church music-the tritone was the "devil's interval." No harmonic
repose here for those souls whose salvation the choir pleads.
2. My analysis of the musical structure of Britten's mass is indebted to the followin

musicological sources: Mervyn Cooke, Britten: War Requiem (Cambridge, 1996); Peter Evan
The Music of Benjamin Britten (Minneapolis, 1979); and Anthony Milner, "The Choral Music,"
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 Re-
quiem was commissioned and where the piece received its premiere per-
formance 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 alter-
nating 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 reg-
ularity 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 absolu-
tion, the certitude of eternal salvation rings forth. Against the dramatic
movement of the orchestra searching out tonal resolutions and the disso-
nance voiced by its accompanying choir, the boys arrest forward devel-
opment toward a cadence-as if superseding the rules of harmony,
represented in each of the harmonium's diatonic triads-through the ex-
traordinary stability offered by the homogeneous twelve-tone scale.3 This
in The Britten Companion, ed. Christopher Palmer (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 329-45. Through-
out this article I quote from the text of the War Requiem exactly as it is printed on the first
several pages, preceding the music, of the authorized score published by Boosey and
Hawkes (London, [1962]).
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.
differentiation between conflict in the human realm and its cessation in

celestial spheres employs the same hortatory rhetoric that underlies Brit-
ten'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 proclama-
tion 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 put-
tees 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 re-
ligious 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"; "-0 what made fatuous sun-
beams 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 end-
ing 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
4. It appears that in composing the War Requiem, Britten copied-and at points al-
tered-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.
sticks captures the unending, mind-numbing rumble of artillery. The tri-

tone, 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 en-
gines 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 re-
emerges, but it has evolved yet again. No longer a dialogue between the
penitent and the saved, the piece has become a dispute between the dis-
tant ethereal spirit and the proximate tragedy of earthbound armed con-
flict. 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.
Church
"Our" salvation? But who at Coventry, precisely, resided within the

comforting compass of that expansive pronoun? All of humanity, seem-
ingly. The postwar ministry of the Coventry diocese explicitly embraced
the principle of "reconciliation" between adversaries, former and current,
potential and real. This meant, first and foremost, a rapprochement be-
tween competing nations in the world, and, above all, in the words of
R. T. Howard, provost of Coventry from 1933 to 1958, a healing of the
"long breach between Britain and Germany" (RR, p. 123). Thinking ana-
logically from this basic precept, Howard could imagine the church also
working as a vehicle for the forging of communal unity in the face of the
many divisions-of denomination, of class, of age, and so forth-that
tended to fragment modern urban populations. H. C. N. Williams, How-
ard's successor and the presiding force at Coventry cathedral at the time
of its consecration concluded: "The belief must be declared that the
Church is the Church, and only becomes the Church when it starts to
proclaim its gospel from an unassailable position which is above every
human division .. racial, economic, political, industrial, social and eccle-
siastical.... The Church is a supra-national, supra-racial, supra-political

fellowship.."5
Spence's building would appear to realize, in stone and glass, these
ideals of social reconciliation and religious ecumenicalism. The desig-
nated themes of its two large, semidetached chapels certainly contributed
to the message. At the Chapel of Christ the Servant the "industrial chap-
lains" 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 Cru-
sade" [quoted in RR, p. 45]) housed the effort to impel the Church of
England and other Christian denominations (excepting the Roman Cath-
olics, 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 can-
opy of spruce slats, black marble floor and wooden clergy stalls, the cut-
glass "west" wall and many sets of stained-glass windows, a fleche 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 theo-
rists of the likes of Ruskin and Morris.
Nothing, however, manifested the ideal of all-encompassing human
concord as effectively as the basic layout of Spence's plan. The high altar,
all those involved could agree, constituted the very heart of the cathedral;
the competition brief of 1951 stipulated as much ("This should be the
ideal of the architect," decreed the preface to the document, "not to con-
ceive a building and to put in an altar, but to conceive an altar and to
create a building"), and Spence enthusiastically concurred (quoted in RR,
p. 115).7 This holy table for the preparation of the Eucharist brought the
living members of the congregation together through a shared liturgical
act and also reaffirmed the ostensible bond connecting the body of man
to the spirit of God through the real presence of Christ.8 Spence's high
altar not only enjoyed pride of place-raised, framed beneath the feet of
Sutherland's Christ, visible from all precincts of the nave, unobstructed
by a screen of the sort frequently intervening in the older cathedrals (see
fig. 3)-it also was bathed in light streaming in from a host of stained-
5. Williams, Twentieth Century Cathedral (London, 1964), p. 6; hereafter abbreviated TC.

6. Spence, Phoenix at Coventry, p. 115.
7. See also ibid., pp. 14, 117.
8. At the end of this essay, I will address Anglican doctrine concerning the sacrament
of the Eucharist.
glass windows, all oriented toward the altar and only fully visible from
there owing to the sawtooth pattern of the cathedral's exterior walls (see
fig. 2). The single point within the cathedral that both drew in iridescence
from the natural sun passing through the colored windows and radiated
out the illumination of supernatural divinity, the high altar incarnated at
the spiritual level the modern secular mission of the church, as articu-
lated by Provost Williams:
The basis of the experiment is the conception of a 'secular' Cathe-

dral, with a community of men working and worshipping in a close
fellowship, and undertaking specific tasks in the community around
it. The Cathedral thus becomes not primarily a place to which people
go, but a place from which activity goes out; a base for an outgoing
operation into as many categories of activity in the community as
possible. [TC, p. 78]
Indeed, given the location of Coventry in the northern climes of Europe

and the odd reorientation of the new cathedral with its "east" altar facing
due south, it was as if the rays of blessed light flowing into and out from
the high altar through Spence's angled windows unfolded, like so many
ribs of an opening umbrella, to shelter the teeming masses of the globe's
populations to the south (except, perhaps, some Scottish Presbyterians
inconveniently tucked yet further to the north).
We needn't trouble ourselves with the patently Christocentric nature
of this recipe for making humanity whole. Undoubtedly, nostalgic fantasies
of "the human race united round the living Jesus" (to quote one parish
priest toiling away in the Coventry diocese) survived long after the British
Empire, along with its proselytizing mission, entered its postwar phase of
terminal decay.9 Tented crusaders of the "World Church" against the infi-
del, indeed. The geometry of the altar as a point of radiance, however,
enacted other, often subtler, exclusions. Seen from above (from the per-
spective of the architect's plan, or perhaps from that of God's higher eye) all
lines traversing the plan shared the capacity of rising sooner or later to the
latitude of the high table, save for one: the line running directly perpendic-
ular to the religious radiance emanating southward from the altar. And
Spence took full advantage of this cartographic idiosyncrasy to finesse a
doctrinal difficulty: How were members of other denominations to partici-
pate in the services at the Chapel of Unity without, implicitly, endorsing the
liturgical centrality of the Eucharist spurned by most Protestants yet em-
bodied by the Anglican high altar? The architect's solution:
I put [the Chapel of Unity] on the axis of the [baptismal] font, as

there were to be two main axes-from the old Cathedral to the altar
and from the Chapel of Unity to the font ...
9. Stephen Verney, Fire in Coventry (London, 1964), p. 9.
If Baptists and Methodists are to worship [in the Chapel of

Unity] according to their consciences and with sincerity, it may be
wrong to be completely within sight of the altar. The Act of Baptism,
however, is another matter, and, as unity is a primary consideration,
the chapel is on the axis of the font. During combined Services, those
wishing to be within sight of the altar can sit near the grille, which is
the limit of the Chapel of Unity. 10
Presumably, those Protestants not wishing to huddle at the threshold of

the cathedral proper could find shade from the iridescence of the Angli-
can high altar deeper within the sanctuary of their perpendicularly pro-
tected chapel.
This artful axial twist to the Chapel of Unity, to be sure, was hardly
called upon to perform much ideological heavy lifting, since Protestants
were first and foremost invited to Coventry owing to their shared reli-
gious sensibilities as Christians, rather than rudely turned away from a
liturgical act distinguishing Anglicans from others. Nevertheless, the axis
laid down by the Chapel of Unity and the baptismal font initiated a larger
scheme of differentiation. For just to the south of this line and (for all
intents) running parallel to it, the walls of the ruined shell delineated the
axis of the former cathedral. And this perpendicular juxtaposition of
prior and current naves did, in contrast, carry great programmatic
weight. Provost Williams had once declared the need, through the proper
architectural means, to rise above social divisions inherited from the past:
The old Cathedral was destroyed in hate. Christians may not leave
open wounds of hate unhealed. Human hope had by that act been
crucified on a world stage. It was on a world stage that the drama of
forgiveness, reconciliation and resurrection had to be enacted. Every
act of hate and bitterness and destruction leaves humanity at a part-
ing of two ways: either to entomb hate and bitterness, and to erect
memorials so that they will not be forgotten, or to 'roll away the
stones' from these tombs, and let hope rise again. The first of these
choices makes it certain that the circumstances of hate and bitterness
will be repeated. The latter makes it certain that the vision of hope
will be made brighter, and the power of hate diminished by a little.
[TC, p. 76]
But, quite obviously, the ruined cathedral preserved beyond the porch of
the new edifice served no greater purpose than to stand as just such a
monument to the senseless destruction of the past-as virtually all par-
ticipants in the project (except, perhaps, Williams) sooner or later pro-
claimed. "The decision to retain the ruins was courageous and wise,"
10. Spence, Phoenix at Coventry, pp. 11, 118.
pronounced R. Furneaux Jordan in the souvenir publication commemo-

rating the reconstruction.
It was not merely that the ruins-including, of course, the magnifi-

cent and intact tower and spire-could become a most impressive
memorial in themselves; they were also the starting point of a theme
that was ultimately to dictate the whole scheme. This was the theme
of Sacrifice and Resurrection.
... Only when we understand this theme do we realise that what
we are seeing is not just a cathedral; it is two cathedrals, in fact an
ecclesiastical group in the mediaeval tradition."
Capital letters flowed freely on this point: Sacrifice (or, sometimes,

Crucifixion) followed by Resurrection-even Williams could subscribe to
these safely platitudinous terms (see TC, p. 76). Yet this bipartite parsing
of the governing concept of reconciliation revealed something short of an
all-embracing intent. A sacrifice had been made; this ancient cathedral-
the manifestation of God's kingdom on earth-had been crucified. And
thus the "ecclesiastical group" gave expression not only to humanity's
loftiest accomplishments but also to its basest deeds; the two cathedrals
together expressed both good and evil. Indeed, the attainment of virtue
at Coventry depended fundamentally on the simultaneous recognition of
vice. At the time of the consecration Lewis Mumford, whipping off a piece
of journalistic fluff, nonetheless stumbled across a point that the structur-
alist scholars in vogue at that time would have taken to be axiomatic:
"Instead of wiping out the old monument in favor of an entirely new
building, Spence strengthened his own composition by emphasizing the
very event that had necessitated the new structure.""2 The sanctity of reli-
gious service in the new cathedral (performed by the English) manifested
itself with especial poignancy owing to the carefully preserved evidence
of sacrilegious perfidy (perpetrated by the Germans) looming just outside
the glass "west" wall. From the light-drenched high altar, one could look
down upon the darkness of mundane sin.
It was not, however, as if Spence's cathedral had simply taken advan-
tage of the ruins for a bit of hard-earned, self-righteous posing; such a
gambit in itself would have been understandable, if somewhat oppor-
tunistic, given the real suffering experienced so recently by the English.
Rather, the juxtaposition of wrecked old and restored new unmasked a
11. R. Furneaux Jordan, "A Challenge to a Thousand Years," in Cathedral Reborn: Cov-
entry, 1962, ed. English Counties Periodicals Ltd., 3d ed. (Leamington Spa, 1964), p. 24.
Similar sentiments are expressed by Spence, Phoenix at Coventry, p. 33.
12. Lewis Mumford, "The Sky Line," The New Yorker, 10 Mar. 1962, p. 94; this essay is
excerpted under the title "Coventry Cathedral" in Out of the Ashes: A Progress through Coventry
Cathedral, ed. Spence and Henk Snoek (London, 1963), n.p.
basic tenet of Christian theology, certainly as it was preached at Coventry.

This was Saint Michael's church, after all: Michael, the patron saint of
God's Christian armies as they campaign against the heathen; Michael,
the weigher of sins at the Last Judgment and the leader of the saved into
God's eternal kingdom (he makes a passing appearance in this role dur-
ing the Offertorium of Britten's War Requiem); Michael, the archangel who
in the Book of Revelation wrestles Satan and throws him into the bottom-
less pit. Michael is a warrior, not a maker of peace, and his goodness
cannot be realized without a personification of evil to be vanquished. No-
where was this characteristic more clearly expressed-or more easily un-
derstood-than in Jacob Epstein's large sculpture of Saint Michael,
mounted on the cathedral's east wall flanking the grand ceremonial steps
leading to the porch (fig. 4). The bishop of Coventry, the Right Reverend
Cuthbert Bardsley, himself attested: "This particular piece of work has
captured the imagination of very many people who ... have seen, in this
quite lovely work, something of the simple, profound message of good
triumphant over evil, of God having the final word over the forces of
Evil."13 (Elsewhere the bishop, eliding for a moment the difference be-
tween human and divine agency, presented this fundamental antithesis
as the great lesson to be learned from the cathedral reconstruction proj-
ect: "The City and Cathedral of Coventry became the symbol not only of
man's determination to bring good out of evil, but it also became the
symbol of the power of God to overrule disaster.")14 Epstein's sculpture
deploys precisely the same geometry of virtue and vice as does the plan
of the cathedral itself. The saint's sunlit brow, an altar of divine righteous-
ness, radiates down the diagonals of arms and legs; the supine Satan be-
low incarnates on the horizontal the vanquished forces of the wicked. To
be Christian, one needed the infidel; for Michael to rise up in his holiness,
Lucifer needed to offer, as support, his ugly physique. Here, then, the
limits of Coventry's capacity for universal reconciliation: at this war-torn
cathedral the affirmation of one's own rectitude depended inalterably on
the rude establishment and laying low of someone else's malignancy.
Requiem
It would be fatuous to deny the presence of devices both textual and

musical within Britten's War Requiem that similarly distinguish a righteous
us from a blameworthy them. Certainly the Missa pro Defunctis, with its
central subject of the Last Judgment, calls for such a separation of the
13. E A. D. Kelsey, interview with C. K. N. Bardsley, "This Magnificent New Cathe-

dral," in Cathedral Reborn, p. 19.
14. Bardsley, foreword to RR, p. v.
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saved from the damned-as in this passage sung by the main choir in the
Dies Irae (the requiem's second movement):
Inter oves locum praesta,

Et ab haedis me sequestra,
Statuens in parte dextra.
Confutatis maledictis,
Flammis acribus addictis,
Voca me cum benedictis.
[Give me a place among the sheep

And separate me from the goats,
Let me stand at Thy right hand.
When the damned are cast away

And consigned to the searing flames,
Call me to be with the blessed.]
The juxtaposition also inevitably plays itself out between the main chorus
and orchestra (supplemented, after the Requiem Aeternam, by a solo so-
prano) and the tenor and chamber orchestra (joined for the remainder
by a solo baritone), with the latter ensemble more than once positioned
on the higher moral or epistemic ground. Consider the contemplative
atmosphere set by the chamber orchestra after distinct musical breaks
away from the main ensemble halfway through both the Sanctus (the
fourth movement) and the Libera Me (the concluding sixth), each of
which grants the male singers a platform from which to reflect back on,
respectively, the brilliance of divine glory and the fretting of tormented
souls, under the new and sobering light of modern warfare's terrible cost.
Or consider the male soloists' explicit refutation in the Offertorium (the
third movement) of the mass's evocation of the holy promise of salvation
made to Abraham "and his seed": Owen's "Parable of the Old Man and
the Young" recasts the Great War as justifiable grounds for the breaki
of that promise by God to humanity, since Abraham in his recent inca
nation ignores the angelic staying hand and instead chooses to slaughte
his son and "half the seed of Europe, one by one." Over and again, th
smaller musical company diminishes the religious sentiments embodi
by the larger choral group, treating them as overly optimistic for th
modern period, if not simply naive.
Yet the War Requiem abjures the clarity of the cathedral's stringen
polemic, for the musical composition allows for a reciprocity of inflect
between the two juxtaposed sides; either can turn on the other. The fa
that this requiem was composed for this cathedral on this occasion cons
tutes on its own an intriguing and knotty inversion of poles. When th
chaos of modern warfare plays itself off against the (perhaps no longe
eternal verities of the church and does so within a setting dedicated to the
proposition that the modern church can overcome the destructiveness of
past wars, then neither the modern nor the ancient, neither the comfort-
ably whole nor the perspicuously fragmented, can unambiguously as-
sume the mantle of moral authority. It is also true that, since Owen's
verses regard war principally as a tragedy of lost life and hope on both
sides rather than as a battle between men for the causes of opposed na-
tions, Britten's resuscitation of such poetry from World War I under-
mines, at least to a degree, the righteousness of England's triumph at
Coventry over the German-inflicted devastations of World War II.
The reciprocity obtains, however, not only as a result of the location
and date of the inaugural performance, but also owing to rhetorical turns
within the War Requiem itself. These begin promptly following the Re-
quiem Aeternam, in the first bars of the Dies Irae. Military fanfares across
major triads in the brass open the movement, joined shortly by the brisk
cadence of marching drums. Granted, this passage of the War Requiem
seems to concede, there need be belligerence in God's great domains. But
to purpose. The purpose of attaining on Judgment Day the destruction
of the human realm irrevocably stained by evil, and, through the "awful
sound[ing]" of the trumpets ("Tuba mirum spargens sonum"), the calling
of mankind "to render account before the judge" ("Judicanti respons-
ura"). Yet the Latin text and its accompaniment by the main orchestra is
hardly allowed final word here. The Dies Irae is the longest and most
interwoven of the requiem's movements, interpolating four of Owen's po-
ems or poem fragments where no other movement includes more than
one. It serves as the requiem's principal vehicle for the extended develop-
ment of the basic antithesis between divine perfection and the human
tragedy of war first set out by the Requiem Aeternam, and each propo-
sition by one ensemble evokes a countering response from the other.
Hence, the martial tones of this opening call to judgment are followed by
an untitled Owen fragment sung by the baritone in a quieter, melancholic
setting played by the chamber orchestra. The brass fanfares transmogrify
into a lilt in the high woodwinds, giving a playful cast to the "voices of
boys" to be heard by the riverside. A slow and forlorn horn solo, however,
has already sounded to fill the role of Owen's "Bugles ... saddening the
evening air." Battle awaits, and "the shadow of the morrow weigh[s] on
men" who can find rest only in the false peace of sleep. What purpose to
the grim trump, this passage queries, when it preternaturally turns boys
into men and extinguishes nothing more vile than their innocence?
And thus the movement continues, as the two principal ensembles
(the boys' choir takes no part) borrow and rework each other's thematic
and musical material, each refiguring the issues of life and death on their
own terms. Together they pass through a variety of moods-melancholic,
tragicomic, enraged-before settling on a mournful exchange between
soprano and tenor. The sad, yet dulcet, high voice, accompanied by choir
and orchestra, which set a stately though slightly uneven pace in a seven-
beat meter, refrains from judgment to plead instead for mercy:
Lacrimosa dies illa,

Qua resurget ex favilla,
Judicandus homo reus,
Huic ergo parce Deus.
[On this day full of tears

When from the ashes arises
Guilty man, to be judged,
Oh Lord, have mercy upon him.]
The tenor interposes with Owen's "Futility," his freely declaimed verse
and the suspended pianissimo tremolos in the chamber orchestra arrest-
ing the slow forward progress of the soprano's call for clemency.
Move him into the sun-
If anything might rouse him now

The kind old sun will know.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,

Full-nerved-still warm-too hard to stir?
Back and forth the free and more rhythmic groups alternate, interweav
The multiple cross-exchanges and reformulations of the Dies Irae have
brought them together to this: a certain shared concern for the dead
desire for resuscitation and redemption. Only one difference would see
to separate them now, but it is the crucial one between celestial hope an
terrestrial hopelessness.
This apparent inclination toward (an unachieved) reconciliation at
the end of the Dies Irae prefigures the gesture toward even greater pro
imity comprised by the instrumentalists in the short and achingly beaut
ful Agnus Dei (the fifth movement). Here the orchestra and chamber
orchestra find common ground-or, to be more precise, a commo
ground bass. The strings of the chamber orchestra open with an undula
ing ostinato of two measures metered in a slow but forward-leaning 5/1
consisting of evenly spaced descending scale steps from the fifth to th
first note in B minor, followed by a similarly regular ascent on the fir
five notes of the C major scale; the first notes of the two measures th
rearticulate the tritone of F-sharp and C. This elegantly compact music
turn, reiterated over and again throughout the movement, maintains
perfect symmetry in two senses: it both follows the same pattern of whole
and half steps descending and ascending and assembles two clusters of
four chromatic notes on each side of an omitted D-sharp.'5 A pithy figu-

ration, then, of the interweaving of optimism (in major) and pessimism
(in minor)-but now accomplished entirely within a single musical motif
rather than across the juxtaposition of antiphonal ensembles. As the sing-
ing of the texts passes back and forth from tenor to choir, the strings and
low woodwinds of the main orchestra pick up and pass back this same
ostinato in such a seamless fashion that, in a sound recording, it becomes
somewhat difficult to detect where one group of strings ends and the
other begins. At long last, it might seem, the pleas of holy petitioners
in Latin and the sentiments of soldiers sung in English can, upon this
shared foundation, join in common cause.
Were it not for the content of the texts.16 "Agnus Dei, qui tollis pec-
cata mundi, dona eis requiem," repeats the chorus throughout the move-
ment, "Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, grant them
rest." These are lofty notions, no doubt. Yet cast under the pall of Owen's
somber poetry, they seem rather the sort of words that might be uttered
by priests and ministers who, from the safety of home shores, are shep-
herding the souls of their countrymen sent off to battle. That men of the
cloth far from the trenches could presume to sermonize in this manner
emerges as the target of Owen's poem "At a Calvary near the Ancre" sung
by the tenor:
One ever hangs where shelled roads part.

In this war He too lost a limb,
But His disciples hide apart;
And now the Soldiers bear with Him.
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.
The scribes on all the people shove
And bawl allegiance to the state,
But they who love the greater love
Lay down their life; they do not hate.
This is harsh. Only suffering soldiers (Owen, a long-term combatant

killed in the last week of combat, certainly qualified) join a twice-crucified
Christ as his true brethren. Those "disciples" and "priest[s]" who claim
to follow but actually keep their distance from Calvary Hill, who sacrifice
others but not themselves, are worse than weak hearted: they bear "the
15. At the end of key phrases, a thrice-repeated extension of the ground bass into the
span of notes from G-sharp to C completes the full set of chromatic tones-excepting the
still excluded D-sharp.
16. The analysis of the texts of the Agnus Dei that follows differs from those offered
by Cooke and Milner (Evans is more equivocal), both of whom find a compatibility of mes-
sage to match the seamlessness of the orchestrations.
name of the beast or the number of its name ... marked on the right
hand or the forehead" (Britten, through Owen, returns us to the Apoca-
lypse of the Book of Revelation). War, after all, is fought in Christ's name,
and those petitioning for the righteousness of their cause-including
such supplicants as the singers of Latin masses--themselves play a minor
yet indispensable role in the devil's crimes.
What to make of this mismatch in the Agnus Dei between the con-
cord of the orchestral accompaniments and the discord of the meanings
of the texts? Two possibilities (at least two) present themselves. The first
would have it that, in the face of the incapacity of the distanced church
properly to preach the lessons of war, soldiers themselves must take on
the task of singing out the battle's grim but momentous refrain. And noth-
ing confirms this interpretation more surely than the final musical phrase
of the Agnus Dei. The solo tenor, now alone, picks up the initial note of F-
sharp and the even pace of the orchestra ostinato, but in his first measure,
instead of descending down the B minor scale, he works his way upward
to form a sparklingly fresh major scale fragment of five notes in F-sharp.
From here, the tenor steps back down a half step to C, as if beginning the
descent through an anticipated F minor, but then rises upward again to
produce an entirely unexpected scale fragment of C minor-the first ris-
ing scale fragment of the movement in the more somber mode. A half
step down to the F-sharp resolves the phrase on the octave. The words-
unique, for the male soloists-in Latin: "Dona nobis pacem" (the score on
this sole occasion employs italics), "Grant us peace." The interweaving of
the high hopes of religious spirituality and the hard truth of worldly trag-
edy here attains full completion in the appearance, owing to the aston-
ishing lowering of the third note in the scale fragment rising from C, of
the previously absent E-flat (which is to say, D-sharp); and in the adoption
by the soldier's musical surrogate of the church's own tongue for the sake
of soliciting not, as in the first movement, "eternal rest" for "them" but
"peace" for themselves ("peace": as much a literal need on war-weary
earth as a figural attribute of heaven).
Or, alternatively: The second interpretation would have it that the
conflict between preachers of the word and doers of the deed, between
the nominally saved and the brutally sacrificed, between (ultimately) the
quick and the dead can never be overcome by any such passing and
merely apparent agreement achieved through the facile intertwining of
notes. And nothing confirms this interpretation more surely than the fi-
nal musical phrase of the Agnus Dei. The tenor-no soldier he, but
rather the agent of the church, performing in its lustrous modern cathe-
dral far indeed from Golgotha--switches to Latin to confirm the sheer
impossibility that this ritual consecration could ever touch on the real
unfathomable horrors of war. His Latin phrase interpolates (again,
uniquely within the War Requiem) a line from the Ordinary of the Mass,
the mass for the living, into a text otherwise devoted strictly to the de-
ceased. "Grant peace to us," the words can be taken to mean, "to those of
us living here and now as churchmen in this cathedral, for we have
evaded the fate-as well as, perhaps, the closeness to Him-to be found
in the trenches." The tenor's closing scale fragments, even as they strive
for new heights, can only replicate the unresolved tension lurking in the
tritone, in the undying difference between major and minor (a minor
that anomalously reappears in spite of that ascent).
How might we-in this deferral, this endless deferral of the prob-
lem-adjudicate between two such competing interpretations (and many
others like them)? The War Requiem (this is its governing conceit, its pow-
erful message) proposes that, just as we cannot reconcile the second-level
difference between orchestral concord and textual discord, just as we can-
not grant the final moral turn either to the celestial choir or to the
haunting voice of Owen, we cannot step up to any unequivocally higher
platform, moral or epistemic, from which to resolve such quandaries of
interpretation. We: the composer, the Anglican church, the devout con-
gregation gathered at the consecration, the pious (along with the musi-
cally inclined) listening on their radios to the ceremony in May 1962,
many more auditors paying heed after the fact to renditions on vinyl or
compact disc, the writers and readers of scholarly articles. The War Re-
quiem warrants no such righteous us-and likewise permits no personi-
fication of evil in them. Members of humanity-the faithful and the
infidel, the English and the German, the living and the dead-may not
all be standing on level moral or epistemic ground, but not one among
us possesses the means or authority definitively to map out the complex
and ever-shifting terrain.
Faith
Might not, then, the second-order irresolution manifested by Cov-

entry cathedral-between, on the one hand, the all-encompassing minis-
try of reconciliation and, on the other, the vilification of others and the
self-righteousness inherent in the conceptual bifurcation of sacrifice and
redemption, of the ruined old and the restored new-might not that irres-
olution likewise lead to a salubrious suspension of moral one-upmanship?
Well, apparently not, for in Spence's structure one of the two poles is
clearly given a stronger ethical charge. Consider the lapidary sentiments
quite literally cut into the stone wall of the old apse behind the Charred
Cross: "FATHER FORGIVE." To be sure, the meaning of such words was
already worn quite smooth by their constant use in the liturgy, where
congregants intoning the Lord's Prayer beseeched divine mercy to fall
upon no one other than themselves. Inscribed on this particular wall so
soon after the destructive inferno, nonetheless, the call for forgiveness
clearly carried the connotation that someone else's greater sins required
first pardon, as if the events of November 1940 had elided one transactor
from the economy of trespasses voiced in that prayer: "And forgive [us
our debts, as we also have forgiven] our debtors." Forgiveness of the Ger-
mans, then-undoubtedly a necessary step on the road to reconciliation,
constituting as it does the crucial moment when anger directed at the
enemy turns into a sense of a shared, underlying human unity (a turn
physically enacted during the procession at Coventry when, near these
engraved words, one pivots away from the Charred Cross in the east to-
ward the hammered-concrete high altar behind the glass wall to the
north). Reconciliation is certainly given the higher mission; at Coventry,
this sentiment was meant to triumph in the present, definitively and fi-
nally, over the hate represented by crucifixions of the recent as well as the
distant past.
And yet, curiously, the principle of reconciliation at the Cathedral
Church of Saint Michael may have been raised to such a high level that
it became alienated within the unfathomable divine. "Father forgive," the
words implore, and the shift of the responsibility for producing an im-
posed resolution onto some greater authority allows the antagonists
themselves, like two tussling tots appealing for parental mediation, to
continue to harbor resentments, as well as a detailed reckoning of past
injustices inflicted. Indeed, the call for forgiveness is something of a self-
negating act, for it cannot voice its demand without rearticulating, with-
out revisiting the wound that requires redress: "Forgive this." Only by
displacing the performance of the act of mercy itself onto some other
entity ("Father" will do nicely) can one speak of the need for forgive-
ness-and thus oneself not fully forgive.
At Coventry, the architectural ensemble was brimming with repre-
sentations of unattainable divinities into whom the powers of reconcilia-
tion could be invested-and thus replete as well with figurations of that
which required amends. The most important of these was the tapestry
designed by the painter Sutherland. Capping the vista beyond the high
altar in the new cathedral to the north (see fig. 3), the work depicts Christ
in glory as described in Revelation 4, his sublimity signaled both by the
comparatively minute loinclothed human tucked between his feet to pro-
vide scale and by the four symbolic beasts-lion, ox, man, eagle-gath-
ered round to render homage. This was not the Christ who suffered
fugitive days on a sin-filled earth but Christ elevated to the perfected
realm of the Father, with the rays of the "'light unapproachable"' (signi-
fying "God Himself" whose "form ... cannot be depicted" but nonethe-
less whose "being must somehow be represented") shining down upon
him.17 Of this image, Provost Howard admitted: "Many, to whom abstract
17. [Howard], "The Coventry Cathedral Tapestry" (1951), in Graham Sutherland, The
Coventry Tapestry: The Genesis of the Great Tapestry in Coventry Cathedral, "Christ in Glory in the
Tetramorph," ed. Andrew Revai (London, 1964), p. 91.
representations of human qualities were unintelligible and repulsive,

found it horrifying and blasphemous to see their Lord so different from
traditional pictures of Him." Such viewers had committed a category mis-
take, however, misconstruing a mere representation for the countenance of
the Lord himself. Howard continued: "All we could do was to explain that
to many the face and figure of Christ was the most beautiful they had ever
seen; that it was not in any case supposed that His face in glory was like any-
thing that could be depicted upon earth; that whatever was depicted could
at best be only a representation of the fact of His ever-living Presence with
us on earth" (RR, pp. 57-58). The realm of the Father and resurrected Son,
implicitly the place where the turn of forgiveness had been fully completed
and moved beyond, lay fundamentally outside the grasp of human cogni-
tion. Those of "us on earth" cannot imagine it, cannot give it image; we
know of it only through a profound act of faith.
In order to safeguard its purity, then, reconciliation has been rele-
gated to the realm of the divine; fine and good. Hypocrisy in the matter
emerged-and I won't shrink from labeling it faith gone bad-when
priest and painter borrowed for mundane purposes against that unadul-
terated principle posited by blind faith, when they arrogated a measure
of its moral authority for the purpose of fighting and forgiving terrestrial
enemies (fighting and forgiving: when positioning oneself over others, on
a higher ethical platform, it matters little which). Thus Howard's formu-
lation a paragraph ago cannot really allow Christ in glory to float free in
its own heavens undisturbed by human cognition; it wants to harness
"His ... Presence" back to the plow of righteous causes on earth. Like-
wise, Sutherland's Christ, basking in the emerald glow of eternal glory,
still bears the traces of his brief passage among hate-filled humans: the
stigmata on his feet, the depiction of his crucifixion at the base of the
tapestry (fig. 5, background). And, in a brilliant stroke of visual align-
ment, the prospect from the center of the nave (see fig. 3) conflates that
depicted crucifixion with the gilt cross mounted just behind the high
altar (see fig. 5, middleground), a modern cross that incorporated into
the intersection of its members the well-publicized Cross of Nails con-
structed out of metal spikes recovered from the ancient cathedral vault
destroyed by German bombs. Forgive this. Reconciliation will be had,
eventually. It is in "His" hands; we have faith. Meanwhile, let us remem-
ber and rehearse, over and again, the injustices inflicted upon us. Let us
dispense our own partial forgiveness, but only from a position of self-
righteous moral authority borrowed from God and earned through our
suffering, suffering wreaked on us by others. It is bad faith of this sort
that lends an unpleasant aftertaste to Provost Howard's self-satisfied tales
of beneficent absolution:
During the late forties the trickle of visitors from Germany to

the Cathedral began to increase. During the fifties it became a steady
10A.
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3p..
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raw."
4z,?
o WO
FIG. 5
dral (N
stream. I took every opportunity of showing them round. At the

sanctuary they would look at the words "Father forgive." In the
Chapel of Unity I would put the Cross of Nails [a reiteration of the
one at the high altar] into their hands and assure them that the Cross
of Christ annihilates the guilt of sinful man. I would tell them the
story of the Kiel Stone. Again and again the spiritual miracle would
happen. Germans still bound in the fetters of war guilt would be
suddenly set free, and would go away with a new sense of release and
tranquil joy. [RR, p. 88]
One wonders who was experiencing the greater wave of happiness: the
Germans to whom war guilt was once again ascribed through these public
performances of being forgiven, or the sanctimonious provost who, in
bestowing such topical forgiveness, reassuringly foisted the sin of modern
warfare onto others.
Let me be clear: This hypocrisy is not some accidental characteristic
generated by the misapplication of sacred principle by mere mortals such
as, say, Howard and Sutherland. It is rather an ineluctable consequence
of any and all attempts to represent, in word or in image, the pure essence
of an absolute value (such as reconciliation) entrusted, by faith, to the
divine. Simply by being brought back into the messiness of the mundane
through the very act of representation-Howard's patronizing ministra-
tions, Sutherland's weft and weave-the principle reenters a compro-
mised place where the proclamation of the good depends intrinsically on
the simultaneous figuration of evil. No forgiveness of Germans at Coven-
try in 1962 without the memory of incendiary bombs dropping in No-
vember 1940. No depiction by Sutherland of Christ in glory without,
just to the left of Christ's knee, the asymmetrical vignette (a fifth, joining
the circle of four symbolic animals) of Saint Michael vanquishing Satan.
Faith, then, shares with forgiveness the characteristic of negating itself
through its articulation: that which it affirms as a pure and celestial truth
it necessarily sullies with earthly attributes merely through the human
act of affirming it.
Britten's War Requiem remains blessedly free of this sort of bad faith;
with the constant mutual inflection between its various voices, the piece
frustrates the construction of any such higher platform for the unilateral
dispensation of absolution. Nevertheless, in the Libera Me-the work's
closing and most dramatic movement-the requiem does manage to rep-
resent what such a platform might look like, were it to exist. Here the
give-and-take of previous exchanges between full and chamber ensem-
bles distills down to the clarifying dialectics of a straightforward polemic
followed by ostensible resolution. The full orchestra and singers in Latin
commence in their most martial mode yet; soon the soprano and choir
are quaking in apprehension-"Tremens factus sum ego, et timeo,
dum discussio venerit, atque ventura ira"; "I am seized with fear and
trembling, until the trial shall be at hand and the wrath to come"-in the
face of a crescendo of the thundering orchestra (joined, for the first time
in the requiem, by the powerful church organ) that represents a wrathful
Jehovah distant indeed from the merciful God to which appeals the
phrase "Father forgive." And then, accompanied by orchestration of gos-
samer thinness, the tenor and the baritone role-play the tragic encounter
from Owen's "Strange Meeting" between, respectively, a walking-dead
English soldier and the reanimated German victim of his bayonet from
the day before. The musical contrast is not subtle, and the symbolism
verges on the ham-handed (at the premiere, the English tenor Peter Pears
sang with the German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau). Less drama
here, perhaps, than melodrama (but effective: apparently Fischer-
Dieskau was so overcome by the poignant reenactment that he finished
the performance in tears)s18-and, accordingly, the juxtaposition of open-
ing and theatrical passages leads to a saccharine denouement. "'Let us
sleep now
Owen's ... .'"rediscovering
poem, The two malethat
voices intertwine
mental around between
state halfway the last line
life of
and
death, both literally mundane and figuratively celestial, first mooted in
the first Owen interpolation in the Dies Irae (where it stood between the
play of boys and the battle of men). The chamber orchestra, and soon the
full orchestra joining it in the only section during the entire requiem
played collectively, effuse a pleasing cloud of harmonic (indeed, largely
pentatonic) accommodation.19 Devices suitable for a Hollywood score-
the plucking of pretty arpeggios on a harp, the crescendo and decre-
scendo of soft mallets on a hanging cymbal--reinforce the happy effect.
The boys, soon supplanted by the soprano and the main choir, voice the
kind fate that awaits (but has yet to befall) these "sleepers" from the
trenches: "In paradisum deducant te Angeli," "Into Paradise may the
Angels lead thee." Here, then, is the closest the War Requiem can approach
the higher platform of a reconciliation between the blessings of heaven
and the ravages of war: a suspension, held in waiting, of the difference
between life and death, between killer and killed; a suspension in sleep
(for Christ it lasted three days; for the rest of us .. .). As limited as it may
be, perhaps we can entrust our faith in this tentative accord.
The very artificiality of this sweetness, however, bespeaks (program-
matically, I believe) its contrivance. Even were the listener to miss the self-
ironizing aspect of this collectively rendered passage (critics have, in fact,
frequently characterized the segment as overly sentimental), Britten's
next musical turn assures that the point should not be missed. After the
sustained period when the ears have been soothingly cleansed of har-
monic conflict, the chimes and the boys, in a dilatory pace that arrests the
18. See Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: A Biography (New York, 1992), p. 408.
19. Eventually, the passage settles on the Lydian mode of D, in its key signature only
one accidental away from the warm and familiar comfort of a major scale.
forward gait of the larger ensemble, return with a jarring, unadulterated

recapitulation of the tritone. "Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine." The
boys' words, repeated from the main chorus's opening to the entire piece,
remind us that even the "rest" of this lately found sleep harbors only the
illusion of peaceful resolution, as well as the seeds of ceaseless perturba-
tion. Twice the larger ensemble attempts to soldier sweetly on, and twice
the boys persist in their disquieting chant. The bells will prevail, and fi-
nally the main choir (the soloists, chamber orchestra, and main orchestra
are now done) concedes to the tritone, drawing the requiem virtually to
its close with a set of slow, strivingly disharmonic tone clusters built prin-
cipally from the C and F-sharp struck once more by the chimes (a recapit-
ulation, actually: both the Requiem Aeternam and the Dies Irae conclude
in a like manner musically, though the words differ in each of the three
cases).
One final twist remains (as there also had been at the finish of those
two previous movements). After working through its tone clusters all con-
taining a disruptive F-sharp (sustained throughout by the sopranos and
tenors), the choir modulates onto a pure, harmonic triad in F-natural ma-
jor. It is as if the thumb and middle finger of a keyboardist had slipped
off the chromatic black keys to land, surprisingly and by chance, on a
chord that actually rings true.20 This final triad, however (and on this
point the critical and historiographic assessment has been unanimous), is
less a final resolution than a declaration of the impossibility ever to re-
solve. For the means of arriving at this tonal triad is so forced, so inad-
equate to the task of coming to terms with the complex history of the
tritone's stabilities and instabilities that precede it in the War Requiem, that
the F major chord-seemingly one of the simplest in music-now cannot
help but contain within itself a representation of the severe constraints
inevitably limiting its capacity to reach harmonic closure. We are left with
the lost memory of what a resolution would sound like if we could get
from here to there, which we cannot.
So there may be nothing left in which to invest one's faith, no resolu-
tion-or even the promise of one-to this fractious encounter between
opposing musical elements, between religion and war. Well, not quite:
Britten's piece provides numerous figurations of that which might inspire
faith in reconciliation ("'Let us sleep now ... "'; the F major triad; earlier
20. Murata has alerted me to the fact that the resolution may not be as fortuitous as
it first appears. The final cluster of F-sharps and C-sharps--two of the three notes of the
triad G-flat, B-flat, and D-flat--constitutes a modified plagal cadence resolving to an F
major tonic (since this major triad of F's minor second differs only one note from the minor
chord of its perfect fourth, B-flat, D-flat, and F; although the implicit subdominant would
be minor, the final triad benefits from the traditional tierce de Picardie, the raising of its third
degree to constitute the major). Nevertheless (as Murata and I agree), the closing chord
still comes as a surprise, an unexpected irruption of pure harmony within an otherwise
dissonant setting.
the boys' choir; or even at points the tritone itself), but only for the sake
of revealing over and again its illusory character. It is as if each act of
solid faith, once figured, automatically and with increasing celerity gener-
ates from within itself the skeptical probing that cuts through the hard
kernel of that which faith has affirmed-until, finally, the three simple
notes of the F major triad simultaneously both avow and deny. Whereas the
linked cathedrals of Spence's ecclesiastical group offered a procession
from worldly destruction toward celestial faith (however bad that faith
turned out to be), Britten's War Requiem insists on the constant proxim-
ity-if not, indeed, the identity-of faith's unstoppable drive and skepti-
cism's unobtainable goal (or, if you prefer, skepticism's unstoppable drive
and faith's unobtainable goal-the two formulations, it follows, are them-
selves nearly identical).
Of course, this outcome could itself be labeled a form of bad faith. If
the essence of faith is blind affirmation beyond the powers of reason,
then clearly something has gone terribly wrong when faith always spits
skepticism back into its own face. Nonetheless-given the ineluctability of
the cathedral's hypocrisy, and in light of our own contemporary scholarly
predilections that place great faith in skepticism while maintaining great
skepticism about faith-one is sorely tempted to conclude that even
though the War Requiem may manifest bad faith, at least Britten's bad faith
is better than Spence's. This is a temptation worth resisting, however,
since to subscribe to its conceit would be, paradoxically, to succumb to
the logic of the cathedral rather than to follow the lessons of the requiem.
Would not such a comparative valuation of bad faiths be nothing other
than a placement of Britten on a higher moral platform than Spence,
precisely the platform of skepticism? What would happen if, instead, we
were to treat the relation of church to requiem not as the architect con-
figured old to new but as the composer juxtaposed Latin mass to English
war poetry?
We might begin by reversing the direction of the conclusion derived
from the image of proximity-verging-on-identity voiced a moment ago: if
faith's affirmations always entail skepticism's critical bite, then skepticism's
critical bite necessarily also entails faith's affirmations. (Faith in what? A
spurious question, since skepticism's capacity to generate faith certainly
should not depend on whatever abilities we, as imperfect humans, may
or may not have to articulate faith's perfect object. Faith in that which
skepticism will be skeptical about, then; faith in the project of skepticism,
including its necessary production of faith.) Accordingly, the choral F ma-
jor triad closing three of the requiem's six movements need not be taken,
on faith, as a musical trace of the profound harmony of divine reconcilia-
tion (explicitly or implicitly, music's harmonies are often regarded in such
a manner: as indexes of the harmonies of the spheres, or of the pure
mathematical order underlying natural phenomena, or of whatever it is
that one assumes lies in the depths beyond the auditory experience of the
music itself). Nor need it be considered, skeptically, as a "mere" surface

phenomenon of conjoined vibrations on the air, incapable of representing
anything more than the impossibility of attaining any resolution whatso-
ever (my interpretation above). The simple F major triad at the culmi-
nation of the War Requiem has, after all, become quite invested with
complexity by the preceding eighty-five minutes of music (much as Cov-
entry cathedral had invested its faith in assuring reconciliation within the
divine). Thus in its negation of the possibility of deeper meaning, the
simple major triad may actually affirm the proposition that the profun-
dity of divine reconciliation, in the only form in which it is to be had, exists just
as it manifests itself, right there on the multifaceted surface of the chord.
Gods do not exist in the depths lost to human cognition; but, then again,
neither is the human realm without its complex convolutions. Eschewing
the epistemic naivet6 and pejorative quality often associated respectively
with the two terms, I propose we consider the gift of Britten's War Requiem
to be this: the situating of the mundane and the divine alike on and
within a "place" (neither a plane nor a space) of profound superficiality.
We could expand on this spatial metaphor. Imagine-as a rough
model of the usual state of affairs, for instance, the situation at Coventry
cathedral-the profundity of the divine as receding away from us into
the depths, attainable only through the penetrating analysis of the her-
meneutic or (to take a shortcut) through a leap of faith. Imagine, further,
skepticism falling like a veil of semiosis across our view into that depth,
leaving us with only the surface phenomena of signs-a high altar of
hammered concrete, the image of Christ rendered in wool-to contem-
plate. The choice between hermeneutics and semiotics here seems clear-
cut and unequivocal: either one stays on the two-dimensional surface of
(mundane) signs, or one enters the three-dimensional depths of (divine)
exegesis or inspiration. What if, however, we were to imagine a place
(again, neither a plane nor a space) somewhere between the two? Recent
mathematics provides us with the appropriate figure: a fractal plane/
space of an indeterminate dimension somewhere between the cardinals
of two and three. This is the place of profound superficiality; it neither
claims to extend fully into the infinite recess (from the perspective of
religious depth, it's flat), nor is it bounded by the finite expanse of the
foreground veil (from the perspective of mere appearances, it's convo-
luted beyond limit). Suddenly the relationships between surface and
depth, between representation and presence, between the mundane and
the divine, between skepticism and faith all take on a different character.
We can contemplate their complex mutual investments and interactions,
their encounters with each other within that realm between the cardinal-
numbered dimensions, rather than assuming a fundamental dimensional
incompatibility between each paired set of terms that prevents them ever
from meeting. The work of cultural analysis can then dispense with the
tendency to bemoan or celebrate (it makes no difference which) the loss
of presence (in whichever of its guises), as well as the practice of affirming

the authentic (in whichever of its forms), in favor of exploring their com-
plex, yet accessible, interplay.
One such interplay: just as the War Requiem invests profundity in (not
beyond) the surface of the F major triad that concludes the piece, so too
the performance of Britten's work within Coventry cathedral at the time
of the church's consecration may well constitute an investment of the mu-
sic's own complex convolutions back into (not above) the Anglican ritual
routinely enacted there. We needn't condemn the church's logic by dis-
cerning its hypocrisies from some higher moral platform provided by the
requiem; we needn't, in other words, use the church's logic to condemn
the church's logic. We can, rather, revisit Anglican rite by investing it with
the requiem's logic of profound superficiality.
What is the central liturgical act of the Anglican rite? The Eucharist,
prepared on and dispensed from the high altar (see TC, pp. 55-57).21
And what was the Eucharist, what did it represent? Well, over that partic-
ular point of doctrine "better men" (to misapply a phrase from Owen)
had fought "greater wars." The Roman Catholic Church professed the
doctrine of transubstantiation, the idea that, with the blessing of the host
by an ordained priest, the profound essence of bread and wine literally
turned into the real body and blood of Christ, even if the surface appear-
ance of their physical characteristics remained the same. Protestant de-
nominations other than Anglicanism for the most part countered
Catholic dogma with the proposition that bread and wine, remaining in
both appearance and essence bread and wine, served rather to represent
the absent body and blood of Christ. Since its inception, Anglican theol-
ogy had sought to steer a middle course between these two relatively un-
compromising stances. Basically, the Church of England endorsed the
concept of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist (a position more
or less shared with the Catholics), yet maintained that divine grace re-
sided in bread and wine not materially because of the blessing by the
priest but rather spiritually owing to the personal faith of the communi-
cant (a position closer to that of the Protestants).22 The logic is gloriously
irrefutable: the Lord's body and blood really are present in the bread and
21. William R. Crockett provides a succinct summary of Anglican doctrine concerning

the Eucharist in "Holy Communion," in The Study of Anglicanism, ed. Stephen Sykes and
John Booty (London, 1988), pp. 272-85. Although my conclusions are radically different
from those of Jean-Luc Marion, my analysis of the Eucharist was aided by his chapter "Of
the Eucharistic Site of Theology," God without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (1982; Chi-
cago, 1991), pp. 139-58.
22. Martin Donougho passes along the apposite ditty, attributed to Elizabeth I:
'Twas God the word that spake it,

He took the bread and brake it;
And what the word did make it,
That I believe, and take it.
wine if (in faith) you believe them to be, and are not if (beset by skepti-
cism) you don't. Certainly this nuanced mechanism for investing grace in
the divine yet being able to recall it to earth through the sacrament lays
itself open to charges of bad faith along the lines I have outlined above.
However, what if, in light of Britten's War Requiem, we were to consider
the Anglican Eucharist delivered from the new high altar at Coventry
cathedral as divinity enacted upon earth in the only form in which it is to be
had, just as it manifests itself, right there in the profound superficiality
(or, in the "essential appearance," if you prefer) of the bread and the
wine? Rather than alienating grace (or reconciliation, or whatever) into
the profound essence of the unfathomable divine, or regretting our en-
trapment within the human level of superficial appearances from which
true grace (and reconciliation, and so on) can never be attained, we can
instead appreciate the manner in which simple mundane activities give
rise to forms more complex, more divine, than themselves. Our contin-
ued skepticism directed at the seemingly superficial nature of human
existence turns into-indeed, becomes identical to-our faith in the
capacity of that existence to generate, and also to engage, the type of
profundity most often ascribed to divinity.
Eating bread. Drinking wine. Nothing could be simpler than such
activities, the staffs of terrestrial existence. Hearing music, or walking
through cathedrals, old and new. These activities are somewhat more
elaborate and certainly more culturally topical; yet they, too, are still fun-
damentally simple corporeal deeds performed by living bodies, not the
abstracted accomplishments of gods. We should allow our skepticism to
question the appearance of that ostensible simplicity. Through the convo-
lutions of the War Requiem and those of Coventry cathedral, through the
investments placed by the Eucharist, divine profundity finds itself resid-
ing not beyond but within the seeming superficiality of our mundane exis-
tence.

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Bad Faith at Coventry: Spence's Cathedral and Britten's "War Requiem"

Author(s): James D. Herbert

Critical Inquiry 25 (Spring 1999)

On the night of 14 November 1940, the Anglican Cathedral Church

James D. Herbert is associate professor of art history and graduate

rounding neighborhoods, became ready fodder for propagandists wishing

!:'PT,:'-? ~:"fi i'-?ii'i

The Nave The Ruins

Detailed Plan of Coventry Cathedral

1 Bookshop 10 Columns forming Aisles

FIG. 2.-Plan of Coventry cathedral (north is left). In H. C. N. Williams, Cov-

"Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine," voices implore in the even

-:;i! i .. . .... . . .........

2. My analysis of the musical structure of Britten's mass is indebted to the followin

Suddenly, the angelic voices of boys. In many churches this juvenile

differentiation between conflict in the human realm and its cessation in

sticks captures the unending, mind-numbing rumble of artillery. The tri-

"Our" salvation? But who at Coventry, precisely, resided within the

siastical.... The Church is a supra-national, supra-racial, supra-political

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

The basis of the experiment is the conception of a 'secular' Cathe-

Indeed, given the location of Coventry in the northern climes of Europe

I put [the Chapel of Unity] on the axis of the [baptismal] font, as

9. Stephen Verney, Fire in Coventry (London, 1964), p. 9.

If Baptists and Methodists are to worship [in the Chapel of

Presumably, those Protestants not wishing to huddle at the threshold of

10. Spence, Phoenix at Coventry, pp. 11, 118.

pronounced R. Furneaux Jordan in the souvenir publication commemo-

It was not merely that the ruins-including, of course, the magnifi-

Capital letters flowed freely on this point: Sacrifice (or, sometimes,

basic tenet of Christian theology, certainly as it was preached at Coventry.

It would be fatuous to deny the presence of devices both textual and

13. E A. D. Kelsey, interview with C. K. N. Bardsley, "This Magnificent New Cathe-

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Inter oves locum praesta,

[Give me a place among the sheep

When the damned are cast away

Lacrimosa dies illa,

[On this day full of tears

Move him into the sun-

If anything might rouse him now

Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,

four chromatic notes on each side of an omitted D-sharp.'5 A pithy figu-

One ever hangs where shelled roads part.

This is harsh. Only suffering soldiers (Owen, a long-term combatant

Might not, then, the second-order irresolution manifested by Cov-