To thine own muse be true

Even Stravinsky admitted that he'd borrowed one too many of Britten's ideas. But then, imitation is not always the sincerest form of flattery.

Some time in 1963, Igor Stravinsky sat down, score in hand, to listen to the newly released LPs of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem - and did not like what he heard. "A Honegger-type cinemascope epic in idiom, derived in part from Boulanger-period Stravinsky," he dismissed the work to his amanuensis Robert Craft, featuring "patterns rather than inventions... an absence of true counterpoint" and "a bounteous presence of literalisms ('the drums of Time' sings the baritone and 'boom, boom, boom' go the obedient timpani)". Stravinsky conceded that the casting of the choir in Latin and the male soloists in English was "a very effective dramatic idea", but concluded that "the composer-laureate's certified masterpiece has turned out, for this well-disposed listener, at least, to be rather a soft bomb".

Just how well disposed he really was might be doubted. There had been tension between the two composers ever since Britten had let it be known in 1951 that he liked everything about Stravinsky's new opera The Rake's Progress - "everything but the music". And more recently, Stravinsky had shown signs of jealousy over Britten's greater popular success. Certainly, when his comments on the War Requiem appeared in Themes and Episodes - the fifth American volume of his so-called "conversation books" with Craft (published in 1966) - they caused quite a stir. Except in Britain, where they remained unprinted until 1972, the year after Stravinsky's death, when they appeared in the final conversation book, Themes and Conclusions - substantially rewritten and with all his strictures on the work itself removed. In his new monograph on the War Requiem in the Cambridge Music Handbooks series, Mervyn Cooke can still be found sustaining the fiction that Stravinsky's criticisms were solely of the hype surrounding the work - despite the evidence of the American edition and Craft's recent affirmation, in a Radio 3 conversation with Stephen Walsh, that Stravinsky really "did say those things about the War Requiem, which he absolutely hated!"

But Stravinsky also did something more positive: he composed a response. And not for the first time. In 1952, he had written a setting of the "Lyke- Wake Dirge", a text already used by Britten in his Serenade, which, Craft has revealed, he actually drew to Stravinsky's attention as an imaginative model of English word-setting. Subsequently Stravinsky was to use some of the same medieval text in The Flood that Britten had set in Noye's Fludde, while in his sacred ballad Abraham and Isaac he tackled the same story as Britten's Canticle II. Yet Stravinsky's versions are so pointedly different that any composer less threatened than Britten apparently felt might have regarded them as at once complementary and complimentary. But by the time he embarked upon his Requiem Canticles, Stravinsky had taken to telling journalists who asked his opinion of the younger composer: "I think that Mr Britten is a very good accompanist." And it was doubtless with a touch of malice that he divulged, "My working title was actually Sinfonia da Requiem and I did not use it only because I seem to have shared too many titles and subjects with Mr Britten already." Indeed, having selected both the Requiem Canticles and the War Requiem for his current series of Towards the Millennium, Sir Simon Rattle should surely have programmed them together. For, beyond the personal differences between their composers and beneath all the tumultuous events of the Sixties, the two works adumbrate perhaps the fundamental conflict running through the arts, certainly through the music, of the decade.

Baldly summarised, this was the question of whether the production of even the greatest art could any longer be justified as an end in itself, or whether the times had become so urgent that all artists ought now to subject their skills to articulating the ideological issues. Yet, where the setting of sacred texts was concerned, Stravinsky was prepared to concede nothing: it was the duty of the believing composer strictly to match the canonic forms of the Church, never to transmute such texts into what he called "secular religious music... inspired by humanity in general, by art, by bermensch, by goodness and by goodness knows what." Requiem Canticles was the last major effort of an 84-year-old composer in rapidly declining health; its dimensions are minuscule, its textures lapidary. But its 14-minute sequence encapsulates a timeless numinosity as does nothing else from the Sixties.

It would, of course, be impertinent to suggest that Britten was any less concerned about the musical integrity of the War Requiem simply because it was also a work with a message. And to those thousands who have been moved by that message, Stravinsky's complaint that the score is derivative in idiom and often thin in substance might seem beside the point, if not downright mean-spirited. But Britten himself hinted that his abiding aim was to find an idiom simple and direct enough to convey his profound disbelief in violence as unmistakably as possible. In a less than inspired performance, it can sometimes seem he carried the process of simplification too far: that, for instance, the "Sanctus" opens with a sequence of mere effects (one of them borrowed from Holst's Hymn of Jesus) rather than real composition; even, that some of the instrumental comments upon the culminating setting of Wilfrid Owen's Strange Meeting border on the banal.

Those who wonder whether the work always represents Britten's invention at its best are accordingly thrown back upon the conviction of its message. But here too matters are not so simple, even if one discounts the allegation that has occasionally been made, that, in setting a First World War poet, Britten evaded the more difficult problem posed for pacifists by a figure such as Hitler and his treatment of the Jews. Dr Cooke concludes, "It is one of the richest ironies of the War Requiem's performance history that a work embodying fundamentally anti-establishment sentiments, attacking both the inhumanity of war and the complacency of conventional religion, should have become one of the most enduring bastions of the British musical establishment" - without apparently realising what further questions this raises about the work itself.

In any case, given the War Requiem's familiarity by now, one would have thought it could have been taken as read, especially since Towards the Millennium also includes a marathon evening of all three of Britten's Church Parables. Then perhaps a little time could have been found among the six main programmes for the not inconsiderable achievements in the Sixties of such figures as Copland, Tippett, Shostakovich, Carter, Lutyens, Ligeti, Boulez and Bernstein, or for that rising young British generation that included Birtwistle, Maxwell Davies, Goehr and Maw. Yet, for those who cannot quite accept the War Requiem as Britten's supreme masterpiece, its inclusion in the series should at least serve to recall how even so profoundly musical a composer could be tempted into proselytising. For many trendier artists, the decade marked an irreversible abandonment of the old compositional ideals of unity and integration for the looser indulgencies of structural and stylistic collage, neo-expressionist hysteria and would- be political shock tactics. And such derelictions were to continue well into the 1970s, of which Rattle is going to find it still more difficult to plan a fair representation next year - not least because those years saw the last exit of a number of more steadfast masters: Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Dallapiccola - and, indeed, Britten himself

War Requiem: Sat/ Thurs, Symphony Hall, Birmingham (0121-212 3333); Wed, RFH, London SE1 (0171-960 4242) and on R3; Fri 14, St David's Hall, Cardiff (01222 878444). Cambridge Music Handbook by Mervyn Cooke (CUP, pounds 7.99)