14 A wartime masterpiece

| English composer Benjamin Britten—a committed pacifist and conscientious objector during the Second World War—wrote an emotional masterpiece to mark the 1962 consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral (the original building was destroyed during a bombing raid). In a brilliant choral gambit, he combined the traditional Latin mass for the dead with poignant anti-war poems by Wilfred Owen, who was killed in battle one week before the armistice brought the First World War to an end. Combining power and outrage with intimate poetic details, it’s a sprawling composition worthy of almost every resource the Toronto Symphony Orchestra can offer: a full orchestra, a chamber orchestra, a full choir, a boys’ choir, three vocal soloists and an organ.