Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen (Oswestry, England, 1893 – Ors, France, 1918)

In 1915, Owen enlisted in the Artists' Rifles of the British Army and that winter served on the Somme, the Western Front of the First World War. He was wounded and admitted to Craiglochhart Hospital, Edinburgh, where he met the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who encouraged his writing. Most of his best poetry was written and polished during his convalescence there. He returned to the front and died a week before the end of the war at the age of twenty-five, having been awarded the Military Cross the previous month. His poetry is a cry against the futility and horror of war. The Parable of the Old Men and the Young tells, in parodically biblical language, the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, Abram's son, but with a different ending than in the Bible: the child is sacrificed. It is a critique of an absurd war by comparing the death of the innocent young man at the hands of his father with the holocaust of half of Europe's youth.

I wrote this song to commemorate the centenary of the start of the First World War in 2015, but it was not premiered until November 4, 2021 by Montserrat Bertral and Raquel Portales at the Frederic Mompou auditorium of the SGAE in Barcelona.