‘Music lifts the words to a level that speech alone can never reach’ Donald Swann’s Requiem for the Living

Mention the name of Donald Swann, the centenary of whose birth fell on 30 September this year, and most people who recognise it will associate him with his song-writing partner Michael Flanders. The duo met at Westminster School, and spent many years in the 1950s and 60s touring their highly successful revues around Britain and abroad. Their formal performing partnership ended in 1967 but its legacy was more than a hundred comic songs, including enduring favourites such as ‘The Hippopotamus Song’, ‘The Slow Train’ and ‘The Gas Man cometh’.

Swann’s career as a composer of serious music is less well-known, though a 2017 Hyperion recording by pianist Christopher Glynn with Dame Felicity Lott, Kathryn Rudge, John Mark Ainsley and Roderick Williams showcased a substantial number of songs written in what he called his ‘lieder style’. His work list also includes a book of carols for use all year round (The Rope of Love); a Jewish cantata (The Five Scrolls); and several pieces for children. 

 A very rare performance of Swann’s Requiem for the Living will be given by Gloucester Choral Society (GCS) this week (on 14 October). Published in 1962, it is a setting of texts by C Day Lewis. Written around the time of the first Aldermaston March against nuclear weapons, which took place in 1958, the poem reinterprets the liturgical Requiem Mass as a vivid plea for mankind to abolish nuclear weapons and respect the beauty of the world. Day Lewis had hoped that Benjamin Britten would set it, but when Britten chose poetry by Wilfred Owen for his War Requiem, Day Lewis’s words were offered to Donald Swann. A Quaker and a pacifist, Swann responded with enthusiasm to the subject matter.

'There was no doubt in our hearts as to the value of such performances. The show did reach out and touch members of the audience and, in turn, others.' © Rob Riley

When I saw that GCS would be opening their 2023-24 season with Requiem for the Living I could scarcely believe my eyes. As a teenager in Belfast in 1970s I attended a performance by Donald Swann and the quartet of singers with whom he was travelling the world, bringing the Requiem and a programme of shorter pieces to troubled spots including the Middle East, South Africa… and, of course, Northern Ireland.

The head of music at my school was also a Quaker and was on the local committee of the international Fellowship of Reconciliation which had organised the group’s visit to Belfast; in fact, our school hall was the venue for the first Belfast performance of A Crack in Time: A Concert in Search of Peace. It included a couple of extracts from Requiem for the Living, with a selection of other hymns and songs.

The concert was memorable not just because of the music but because so few musicians from outside Northern Ireland were venturing to Belfast at the time. But Swann and his group took A Crack in Time to the most dangerous areas of the city; he describes in his autobiography how, ‘It was poignant to play such a concert in the middle of ruined streets that looked as if their teeth had just been pulled out. Few people ventured out at night and the very people we wanted to play to – the militants – weren’t in the audience. But there was no doubt in our hearts and fingers as to the value of such performances. The show did reach out and touch members of the audience and, in turn, others. After playing to a Catholic audience in Ballymurphy, they said: “We’re used to requiems because of the number of deaths we have and if yours is for the living, and hopes of a rebirth and restart, we need it.”’

Donald Swann’s group brought the Requiem along with a programme of shorter pieces to troubled spots across the world

Their final concert, including a full-length performance of Requiem for the Living, was given in the music department of Queen’s University. I persuaded my mother to take me to hear the group again; Swann’s music, his passionate commitment to the cause of peace and their engaging performances made a deep impression on me.

GCS’s forthcoming performance of Requiem for the Living has been inspired by equally vivid memories of the piece. It was originally suggested by Paul Collins, a former member of GCS, who took part in the premiere with the Elizabethan Singers in Blackheath, South London, on 28 September 1969. ‘Jill Balcon, the celebrated actress and the wife of Cecil Day Lewis, was the speaker, and Brian Kay the baritone soloist,’ he recalls.

Another request came from current GCS member Jonathan Billinger, who sang Requiem for the Living as a tenor in two concerts at Barton Grammar School, North Lincolnshire, in 1974 and then on 31 January 1975 under the composer’s direction. It was he who flagged up Swann’s centenary year as an appropriate occasion for a performance by GCS.

‘It is quite unlike anything else in the repertoire' © Rob Riley

‘The work has several deep messages for humankind, just as relevant today as in the 1960s,’ he says. ‘The cold war may have been my generation's overriding worry but now we have the climate crisis on top of all the violence of the 21st-century world. As well as the profound lyricism of the C Day Lewis poetry, the music lifts and illustrates the words to a level that speech alone can never reach.’

Requiem for the Living is scored for speaker, mezzo-soprano or baritone solo, mixed chorus, percussion, cimbalom and piano. It was new to Adrian Partington, musical director of GCS, who will conduct the concert. ‘It is quite unlike anything else in the repertoire – it is in a really interesting mixture of styles; and the cimbalom gives it a unique atmosphere,’ he says, adding that he has chosen to pair it with a very familiar piece that has a similar message and similar instrumentation: The Armed Man by Karl Jenkins.

Billinger has been carrying his red-covered score of Donald Swann’s Requiem around with him ever since those schoolboy performances, but hadn’t had another chance to sing it until GCS rehearsals started a few weeks ago. I too have waited 50 years to hear it again. It should be a memorable evening!

Gloucester Choral Society will perform Donald Swann’s Requiem for the Living as part of their Concert for Peace in Gloucester Cathedral at 7 pm on Saturday 14 October.