Like other Soviet Requiem compositions such as Dmitri Kabalevsky's, it does not set to music the Roman Rite liturgy, but secular poems by Mikhail Dudin, Munetoshi Fukugawa, Federico García Lorca, Dmitri Kedrin and Sara Teasdale.
The use of anti-war texts links this work to Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, which Weinberg knew well.
It consists of the following movements: It was not performed in the composer's lifetime, the premiere only taking place on 21 November 2009 in Liverpool by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus, with Thomas Sanderling conducting.
[6] Their description page (and the NUKAT description) note that the work requires soprano, children's chorus, mixed chorus, and full orchestra.
The score is headed by an excerpt of a short poem by Aleksandr Tvardovsky: