Programme Notes

This setting of Dulce et Decorum Est is a rewrite of a composition that won me a prize during my A-Levels in 2013 - this rewrite, however, only uses the bare minimum of material from the original. I rewrote the piece to be performed at the Remembrance Concert of the choir of Peterborough Cathedral on 11th November 2023.

The poem "Dulce et decorum est" was written in 1917 at Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh. It describes a group of infantrymen trudging through the ugly detritus of the trenches to their billets, and falling uder attack by gas shells. Wilfred Owen describes the Chlorine gas' horrific effects on a soldier who fails to don his mask in time. The poem is plain and brutal, quite in contrast with some of Owen's contemporaries and the rhetoric of pro-war campaigners in Britain - one need only look at the work of some other poets like Jesse Pope and Rupert Brooke, the outright lies of the news outlets in Britain, or the reprehensible actions of those who gave white flowers to those who cannot fight, to see the atmosphere that Owen was repulsed by. During his stay at Craiglockhart, Owen became the editor of the hospital magazine, and through this, he befriended a fellow war poet: Sigfried Sassoon. It was Sassoon's encouragement and guidance that lead to the redrafting of this poem and several others (including, among others, Anthem for Doomed Youth). On the original manuscript, their collaboration is evident in the form of corrections, redactions, and suggestions. Dulce et Decorum Est is no exception: an entire preamble to the gas attack was cut, and some words were changed. Owen would not live to see the larger body of his work published: he was killed on 4 November 1918 at the age of 25, nearly a week to the hour before the signing of the armistice. Sassoon would see to it that his friend's poetry was published in the following years.

My newly rewritten setting of the poem makes use of a bleak and deliberately thick musical character: I had, in my mind, the liquified mud of the battlefield and the unnatural shapes of the landscape. I found myself becoming very worked up about the penultimate section of the song: the description of the corroding body after the gas attack. I took inspiration from visual sources such as the painting "Gassed" by John Singer Sargent and photographs from the front line, both of which can be accessed via the Imperial War Museum.

To quote Wilfred Owen, my subject is war and the pity of war.