This story has shaped Judeo-Christian attitudes towards authority, rebellion and generational conflict for millennia. Abraham is commended for obediently passing this "test" of his faith in God, and the message is: do as you're told and order will not be upset.
In contrast, in the great Greek infanticidal-patricidal story, Laius tries to thwart fate by leaving his baby son Oedipus to die but, as prophesied, Oedipus grows up to kill Laius unwittingly. The message here is: the old guard will be toppled by the young, whether anyone likes it or not.
In the War Requiem poem, Owen shocks by changing the biblical story. An angel tells the old man to sacrifice "the Ram of Pride" instead of Isaac, and the poem ends: "But the old man would not so, but slew his son/ And half the seed of Europe, one by one." Unexpectedly disobedient in order to kill his son, Abraham becomes Laius; he becomes the World War I leaders who needlessly threw away their youths, like lambs to the slaughter.
War Requiem makes Owen's sting even sharper. The children's choir, in Latin, asks for the souls of the soldiers to be given life "as you promised Abraham and his seed", a promise which has just been rejected in the poem. Britten's bitter message of "the criminal futility of war" is clear.
Our habit of pouring new meanings into old-story wineskins like this is one reason why religion - a wealthy hoard of sometimes jealously guarded old tales - is art's most productive engine as well as its most vicious suppressant.
At the start of the rebellious 60s, perhaps the first War Requiem listeners also heard the piece as a call against conformity with the old guard? Last week in the Auckland Town Hall's secular space, the piece could be heard as a rejection of religious hypocrisy. From an Old Testament parable to a World War I poem to a 1962 requiem to a 2013 performance ... meaning shifts again.