War Requiem The chamber orchestra accompanies the intimate settings of the English poetry, while soprano, choirs and orchestra are used for the Latin sections; all forces are combined in the conclusion. The Requiem has a duration of approximately 80-85 minutes. The "War Requiem", first performed on 30 May 1962, was commissioned to mark the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, which was built after the original fourteenth-century structure was destroyed in a World War II bombing raid. The reconsecration was an occasion for an arts festival, for which Michael Tippett also wrote his opera "King Priam". Britten, a pacifist, was inspired by
History of Coventry Spence and contains the tapestry, "Christ in Majesty" by Graham Sutherland, and the bronze statue "St. Michael and the Devil" by Jacob Epstein adorns the exterior wall. As a result of postwar redevelopment, Coventry now shares in the stereotype of 1960s architecture: concrete and brutalist. The development of Coventry's central business district was unnaturally restricted through the construction of a major orbital ringroad in the early-1970s, leading to a hodge-podge of "mixed use" city zones with no clearly defined functions, aside from the cathedral quarter and a dated 1950s shopping precinct. The construction of the Cathedral Lanes shopping complex in