Not many great composers can claim to have served in the armed forces for the full four years of a world war. Ralph Vaughan Williams was an established composer of 42 when the Great War broke out in 1914, but he immediately joined the army, serving first for two years as a wagon orderly in the RAMC on the Salonika front, and later as an artillery officer in France. The works he wrote immediately after the war, such as "The Lark Ascending" and the "Pastoral Symphony", turn away from the horrors of battle and reflect rather the eternal qualities of English character and landscape which a soldier far from home might dream about and long for. It was not until 1936, when storm clouds were beginning to gather for another dreadful conflict, that he composed his great cry for peace "Dona nobis pacem". The first performance was by the Huddersfield Choral Society as a concert to celebrate its centenary.

The parallels with Britten’s War Requiem, written nearly 30 years later, are striking. There is the same contrast of text from the Mass and the Bible with settings of modern war poetry (in Vaughan Williams’s case three moving poems by Walt Whitman, inspired by the American Civil War). The second movement, "Beat! Beat! Drums!", opens with brass fanfares recalling those in the Dies Irae of the later work. Dona nobis lasts about 40 minutes and is scored for soprano and bass soloists, chorus and a large orchestra. It has six movements and, again like the War Requiem, ends on a note of reconciliation and hope: " Nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more . . . Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men".

 Few composers have been as successful as Mozart in producing masterpieces in virtually every musical genre. Nor have many achieved his extraordinary blending of tuneful approachability with the utmost profundity. Other composers satisfy one or other aspect of our musical needs; Mozart’s symphonies, concertos, chamber music and operas combine to satisfy them all. One eternal sadness, however, is that both the greatest specimens of his religious choral music, the Requiem and the Mass in C minor, remain unfinished. Work on the Requiem was, of course, interrupted by Mozart’s death, but the reasons for his failing to complete the Mass seem to be more mundane. In August 1782, not long after settling in Vienna, Mozart married Constanze, the younger sister of his first great love, an opera singer named Aloysia Weber. The Mass was written to fulfil a vow that when he brought his wife to Salzburg to meet his father and sister, he would have a new mass of his performed there. By the time that visit came about in the summer of 1783, Mozart had completed the Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus and Benedictus, together with two movements of the Credo complete in outline, but not fully scored. The bulk of the Credo and the Agnus Dei remained uncomposed.

The Salzburg performance, on 26^th October 1783, may possibly have been given in that form, though to have performed an incomplete Mass in a Roman Catholic church would have been highly unusual. When Mozart returned to Vienna, he had little incentive to complete the work. It was not a commission which had to be supplied to specification; Mozart no longer had a post connected with the Church, and there was no market in Vienna for the Mass commercially.

Thus, what we have is some fifty minutes’ music of a work planned to be almost twice that length. As usual nowadays, tonight’s performance will consist of the extant movements only (but including the Credo in unum Deum, the Et incarnatus, and the Osanna, as completed by H.C. Robbins Landon). The surviving movements of the Mass are a pinnacle of Mozart’s achievement, combining lyricism and contrapuntal skill in a blend of sublime and passionate intensity.