The doleful sound of a ship’s horn introduced Requiem for the Lost Souls of the Titanic at St Anne’s in Belfast on Saturday evening.
Jarring brass depicted the crashing of the waves and lent a sense of foreboding inside the Church of Ireland Cathedral in the city where the liner was built.
A meditation read by local novelist Glenn Patterson spoke of the sense of loss and put words into the victims’ mouths, observing that they missed weddings and birthdays, the First World War trenches and Elvis, emphasising the time elapsed in this centenary year.
“We passed instead into myth, launched a library full of books, enough film to cross the Atlantic three times over, more conspiracy theories than Kennedy, 97 million web pages, a tourist industry, a requiem or two,” Mr Patterson said.
“We will live longer than every one of you.”
The composition by Belfast composer Philip Hammond included the Downshire Brass Band and Belfast Philharmonic.
His work featured male chorists dressed as cabin crew, in dark-blue waistcoats and white shirts and carrying candles. Women, covered head to foot in black, stepping delicately and slowly, also bore flames to the dead while a group of children, who could have been cabin boys draped in purple with black capes tied at the neck, filed into the atrium of the imposing grey stone-colonnaded cathedral.
Mr Hammond said in a programme note: “This setting is dedicated to two people, one who died very old and one who died very young. Within my own experience, they mirrored the huge range of people who lost their lives as a result of the Titanic disaster.”
The meditations focused on the imagined experiences of the victims.
“That first plunge, as stunningly cold as a face in the basin on a winter’s morning, whisking breath away.”
Mr Patterson also envisaged the radio operator, calling for help as his windowless Marconi wireless room was filled with water, the sudden loneliness of his death.
From the walls of the Anglican Cathedral flew the union flag, alongside a painting on the wall which appropriately featured a ship tossed on stormy waves with jagged mountains in the background.
One reading alluded to Northern Ireland’s divided past, as well as the character ascribed to the Titanic’s builders.
“Whether it is building things up or tearing them down...we manifest a singleness of purpose that would scare you...the worst of people and the best.”
Chief among the attendees were Sinn Fein’s deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, who led a torchlit procession after the service.
Grief was the key message of the mass, although few in the packed lines of seats cried for a different generation, a century distant.
Mr Patterson spoke the words of a band member, playing on as the waves lapped at their feet.
“Oh my honey, oh my honey, if you could only see me, in my raincoat and my muffler here on deck, I like to think you’d blow me a kiss and dance.”
The medium of a piano trio was used as a tribute to the musicians who died. Nearer My God to Thee went the first musical meditation, the Last Walz and The Parting of Friends were among later pieces.
A final thought on remembrance by Northern Irish poet Michael Longley, dwelling on the commemoration of tragedies like the First World War, was included in the programme.
He said: “We are blessed to have in Philip Hammond a splendid Irish composer who will listen to the sea and bring back to us the voices of the drowned.”