A pacifist composer’s debt to Budleigh’s Richard Rodney Bennett

The oratorio Or Shall We Die? was commissioned from author Ian McEwan and composer Michael Berkeley by the London Symphony Orchestra Chorus.

Michael Berkeley, otherwise known as Baron Berkeley of Knighton, was born in 1948, son of the composer Sir Lennox Berkeley. As a chorister at Westminster Cathedral, he frequently sang in works composed or conducted by his godfather Benjamin Britten, who was noted for his pacifist views. 

Berkeley studied composition, singing, and piano at the Royal Academy of Music and in his late twenties began to concentrate exclusively on composing, studying with Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, whose East Devon upbringing in Budleigh Salterton is well known, and who had also studied under Sir Lennox Berkeley at the Royal Academy of Music. 

Along with composing, Berkeley has had a long career as a broadcaster on music. In 2013 he entered the UK's House of Lords, where he has consistently spoken in support of music and music education.    

Or Shall We Die? was first performed in 1983, the year in which US President Reagan declared that a nuclear conflict in Europe was not only thinkable, but winnable. It was the year in which cruise missiles came to Britain, and which saw the founding of the organisation Musicians for Peace and Disarmament (MANA), of which Michael Berkeley is a Patron. 

‘For more than thirty years we have been in a position unprecedented in our history to destroy ourselves as a species. There are now more than sixty thousand nuclear warheads primed and programmed for their destinations, and each year more sophisticated systems are planned and deployed,’ wrote McEwan and Berkeley at that time. 

Going on to describe the origin of Or Shall We Die?,  the pair explained: ‘This oratorio grew out of the conviction that the responsibility of the survival of our species is not limited to governments, but is collective, involving every single one of us. It is as if we had been set a simple test of maturity; we either pass it, or perish, for it seems unlikely that we can muddle through forever with this array of weapons.

‘Our manly civilisation with its emphasis on aggression, competitiveness, objectivity, the mastery of nature, will need to become more womanly if it is not to destroy itself; more compassionate, nurturing, intuitive in its best sense.’

McEwan and Berkeley acknowledge their debt in Or Shall We Die? to the ideas of the Romantic poet and artist William Blake, arguing that only if we have the strength to bind feeling to the intellect shall we survive. ‘Blake is the presiding spirit of the work,’ they write.  

Images of Lord Berkeley, top left and Sir Richard Rodney Bennett from Wikipedia

A full account of Or Shall We Die is at https://www.michaelberkeley.co.uk/works/choral_with_orchestra#or_shall_we_die

If you are interested in the history of early America, and Roger Conant as a peacemaker in troubled times you can join the Devon Peacemaker Festival Facebook group at 

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