Composer

Richard Rice

Program Notes

I began work on Dulce et decorum est in 1991, having recently heard a stunning performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, which interpolates other war poems by Wilfred Owen. I spent a decade bringing the original idea to fruition, revisiting the piece many times, and incorporating various techniques I was developing in other works. These included a nine-tone scale, which alternates half- and whole-tones, divides evenly at the tritone, and allows for simultaneous major and minor triads, familiar from jazz harmonies, but treated as consonances, rather than dissonances. The resulting harmonic progression follows a circle of minor thirds that outline a diminished chord. The piece began life in standard SATB format, but quickly expanded to six voices. There are no voice pairs, but rather evenly spaced parts, with added mezzo soprano and baritone. The nontraditional scheme allowed me to conceive certain sections as two three-part choirs doubled at the octave, and to use octave doubling to highlight certain melodic themes against a four-voice harmony.

I divided the piece into four sections that correspond to the four sections of the poem. The slow, expository first section, which anticipates the attack, incorporates a rhythmic ostinato in the alto and bass, to give the sense of a slow march. It ends with an increasingly frenetic repetition of the word “gas,” as the realization of an attack sets in. The brisk second section, which describes the attack, incorporates a double fugue (“But someone still…”) whose themes alternate major and minor triads to create a sense of tonal disorientation. After a brief interlude (“Dim, through the misty panes…), the fugue returns, over which the tenor and soprano add the commentary in longer notes (“In all my dreams…”), and high and low choirs hammer out the final words in strident harmonies (“guttering, choking, drowning”). The slow third section evokes the dream-like reflection on the attack, and provides a transition to the fourth section. I had originally conceived the fourth section as a four-part renaissance-style motet on the Latin couplet, “Dulce et decorum est…” As the six-voice scheme developed, rather than rewriting the counterpoint for six parts, I used the extra two voices to interpolate the English text, “My friend you would not tell…” This provides running commentary to the Latin text to reinforce Owen’s own rebuttal.

Wilfred Owen wrote “Dulce et decorum est” sometime between 1917 and early 1918. Several drafts survive that are difficult to put in chronological order (but are fascinating to study for insight into his creative process). Various anthologies publish slightly different versions, but I settled on the version found in The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by Jon Stallworthy (W.W. Norton, 1985). The work is, by Owen’s own description, a “gas poem.” Gas played an infamous role in the Great War, and renewed fear of such weaponry in our own day lends particular relevance to the poem. The Latin text is from Horace: “How sweet and decorous it is to die for one’s fatherland”: decorous in the sense of honorable and tasteful—a beautiful thing. I have heard that the Latin verse was inscribed on the wall of the chapel at Sandhurst College, where officers of the British army, including Wilfred Owen, received their training.

Owen is representative of a group of war poets who became more prominent during and after World War I, and whose precursors included, most notably, Walt Whitman. They are participant poets, who used their poetic perception to observe the carnage of war in all its horror, yet managed, through their use of sensuous language and imagery, to create vignettes that reveal a unique sense of beauty. I have long been fascinated by the juxtaposition of beauty and ugliness that has permeated so much of the great art of the past hundred years, whether visual, musical, or literary. It is especially from the perspective of war that artists have reoriented our sense of beauty and truth in art. Grounded in a lived reality, their efforts are far removed from the facile, affected attempts of lesser contemporary artists to shock and confound. For artists of integrity, ugliness is always the perversion of beauty, behind which the shadow of beauty yet remains.

This is one of Owen’s more overtly moralistic poems. The “friend” Owen addresses is, in particular, the contemporary poet Jessie Pope (to whom he originally intended the dedication), and in general, the writers of war poetry common in his day, whose works tended more toward the patriotic than the descriptive. Against such popular images, Owen’s vision wreaks iconoclastic havoc: “Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots/ But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;/ Drunk with fatigue…” In stark contrast to the image of the nobly slain warrior, Owen presents the agonies of the gassed: “But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,/ And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…” In unforgiving terms, Owen invites his readers to share these agonies, as a nightmare vision:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin…

The face of the gassed becomes truly grotesque, even demonic. I read the description of his face, “like a devil’s sick of sin”, both in the literal sense of a face marred by the effects of ultimate moral sickness, and in the colloquial sense that even a devil can come to despise his own corruption. Using harshly onomatopoeic words—“obscene”, “bitter”, “vile”, “incurable”—Owen presents the ultimate perversion of beauty.

I began work on the piece as a modest reaction to the first Gulf War, and found myself making the final revisions, preparatory to this performance, in the midst of the second Gulf War. Which raises the inevitable question: Is this an anti-war poem? The current revival of patriotic fervor cannot undo the horrors of a century’s worth of war, nor can a child raised during Vietnam easily conceive of a poetry that is “pro-war.” On the other hand, Wilfred Owen himself served with distinction and bravery, and made the ultimate sacrifice mere weeks before the signing of the Armistice.

To his memory, then, this work is dedicated, and to the memory of all artists who served and sacrificed, while at the same time endeavoring to tell the truth through their art. Their work serves as a desperately needed corrective to the glorification of war, and as a commentary on its horrors and its ultimate futility as a way of life.