Cantata Misericordium
Benjamin Britten

The Boston Cecilia performed this piece at New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall in Boston on April 9, 1994.

The Cantata Misericordium was completed in May 1963, nine months after the premiere of the War Requiem. In many ways it can be considered an appendix to that work though, obviously, on a less monumental scale. It was first performed in Geneva in September, 1963, at ceremonies celebrating the centennial of the Red Cross. The story it tells is singularly appropriate for the occasion. A lone traveller is set upon by bandits in the desert; beaten, robbed, stripped and left to die. Shunned in turn by Priest and Levite, he is at last, when all seems lost, rescued by the Good Samaritan. The choice of Patrick Williamson's Latin setting is apt in ways that no modern language would be in honoring the work of an organization whose good works transcend the arbitrariness of frontiers — political, racial and theological.

The theme of the cantata is compassion: the practice of it, not just the sentiment. "Doing nothing," says Britten scholar Peter Evans, "is, very palpably, the sin against which this work speaks." Where the Requiem repeatedly confronts us on both the personal and universal level with the brutal inhumanity of global war, the cantata quickly passes through the details of the actual assault to focus on the question posed by Roman and Jew at the outset: "But who is my neighbor?"

The orchestration is a model of economy and genius: string quartet and string orchestra, piano, harp and timpani. The music of the quiet ritornello of the quartet which opens the cantata is picked up by the chorus at "misericordes", and reintroduced several times later to indicate the passage of time and to allow for reflection on the rapidly unfolding events of the story.

The music for tenor and bass soloists offers several reminders of the Requiem, especially the haunting F sharp major at "Dormi nunc, amice" (Sleep now, my friend), and the fifths, mirror intervals and unisons of their duets at the beginning and end of the cantata.

The chorus acts as commentator, deeply involved spectator and, at the beginning and end, as moral homilist, "Blessed are the merciful;" "Go and do likewise."

-Donald Teeters

© 2004 Donald Teeters. All rights reserved.