On Saturday night, I debated whether to tune into Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem at the London Proms (BBC Radio 3), or a documentary on Radio 4, The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski. Spoiled for choice – something of a First World problem. I remember being faced with such dilemmas as a child, particularly on the telly, when I really did need to choose one programme and sacrifice the other – no “sounds” or i-player. I remember saying to my cousin, “Wouldn’t it be marvellous if there was a device, something like a tape recorder, that could record both sound and pictures together, so that we could save programmes and watch them later?” She raised her eyes to the ceiling. I was talking science fiction. Presumably the BBC owned such a device, but even they were profligate with their own productions, constantly tossing chunks of the archive into a skip. Nowadays, when every picture, or utterance, sane or mad, survives in the cloud for perpetuity, I have no interest.
In the event, I listened to the Bronowski, and then watched the Britten on Sunday evening on television on BBC 4. I was a great fan of Bronowski’s thirteen part history of science which was first broadcast in the 1970s, and did for science what Kenneth Clark’s thirteen part Civilisation had done for art. Both series were wonderful. Was not the BBC more audacious then than it is now? And more trusting of the audience’s intellect, staying power, and attention span. Crucially, both series used “background” music very sparingly. Now, musical gloop fills the airwaves. Broadcasters are terrified of dead air.
I can’t say I learned much from The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski that I didn’t already know. For all the immense success of The Ascent of Man, there was, and always has been, an academic backlash against it. Bronowski was aware of it, and even parodied it. “It isn’t sound you know, it isn’t sound.” I dare say there was a certain amount of professional jealousy involved. Bronowski was a fantastic communicator. His appearance on the Michael Parkinson show bears this out. Watch it, and see if I am not right. He has a beguiling way of pausing briefly before answering each of Parkinson’s questions. Parkie came as close as he ever did to asserting that this was his favourite of all his interviews.
It is said that there was a dark side to Bronowski, with respect to his mathematical work during the Second World War. He was a boffin. I believe he worked on the destructive power of bombs. I had hoped that The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski might cast a little light on this, but the documentary was thin on detail. No doubt Bronowski, rather like the occupants of Bletchley Park, was sworn to lifelong secrecy. So we are left with the rather unsatisfactory thesis that it was some internal sense of guilt that drove Bronowski to step into a pool at Auschwitz, and to let the ashes of his ancestors run through his hands. This was the culmination of Part 11 of The Ascent of Man, Knowledge or Certainty, a little masterpiece. There is some kind of unspoken innuendo here that I don’t understand. You could as easily imply as much about Barnes Wallis, or Johnnie von Neumann, or R. J. Mitchell, or Frank Whittle, or Enrico Fermi, or Richard Feynman. Or indeed, Werner Heisenberg, or Wernher von Braun. Maybe there’s something in it. Once you chuck your hat into the ring, once you take sides and get involved, you cannot avoid sharing your part in a collective guilt. (Talking of hats, somebody has just bought Indiana Jones’ fedora for about half a million pounds. He must be off his head. I digress.) Benjamin Britten’s contribution to the war effort could be said to have been more oblique. He had pacifist views, and was in the USA in 1940. He accepted a commission then from the Japanese Government to compose his Sinfonia da Requiem, a wonderful work, which the Japanese politely declined to accept apparently because of its Christian connotations. Britten returned to the UK during the war. He visited Wormwood Scrubs to entertain the inmates, one of whom was Michael Tippett, another pacifist. At the end of the war he persuaded Yehudi Menuhin to let him be his accompanist when he visited a newly liberated Belsen concentration camp. So, like Bronowski, Britten had a desire to confront humanity’s darkest manifestation. The War Requiem deals with the pity, and futility, of war. It was composed in 1961-62, to commemorate the rebuilding, and consecration, of Coventry Cathedral following its destruction by the Luftwaffe in 1940, in Unternehmen Mondscheinsonate (Operation Moonlight Sonata. If Beethoven had known, I think he would have obliterated the title superimposed upon his Op. 27, No. 2.) It was blitzed, or “coventrated” (koventrieren – Dr Goebbels’ term, I believe.) At the time, Coventry Provost Dick Howard wrote the words “Father forgive” on the ruined walls of the cathedral, and he rather got into hot water for it. He was sent to Coventry. The War Requiem was an attempt to put into words and music Wilfred Owen’s message that all a poet can do is warn. The solo voices in the first recording, conducted by Britten, were English, German, and Russian, Peter Pears, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and Galena Vishnevskaya. That recording has become something of a touchstone, but the performance on Saturday under Sir Antonio Pappano was a revelation. I had always chiefly devoted my attention to the settings of Owen’s poetry, but on Sunday it was the text of the Latin mass that gripped me. I’m not usually much of a fan of hellfire and damnation, but in this context the mass really became a depiction of the manmade hellishness of war, and also, vividly, an expression of Britten’s anger in the face of its futility. Sadly, the work remains as relevant to us as it ever was. We don’t seem to have captured the knack of turning swords into ploughshares.
jamescalumcampbell 