The Great War -- 100 years.

The Great War -- 100 years.

August 4, 2014.  The Great War.   We’d like to commemorate in our own small way, one of the most profound events in modern history, The First World War.  It started 100 years ago with Austria-Hungary attacking Serbia in a reprisal for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.  Russia, Serbia’s ally, mobilized their armies.  Other great powers – Germany, France and Britain – followed the suit.  Very soon, events snowballed out of control: Germany invaded neutral Belgium and then France, Britain declared war against Germany, and a war that would last four years and result in 16 million deaths and 20 million wounded was on.  Even though casualties for Russia and France were higher, Britain lost more composers on the front.  George Butterworth joined the British army at the beginning of the war.  At 29, he was known as a composer of great promise.  His song cycle A Shropshire Lad and a short symphonic poem The Banks of Green Willow were premiered to critical acclaim in the year before the war (here it is, performed by the English String Orchestra, William Boughton conducting).  Butterworth was killed on August 5th, 1916 during the terrible Battle of Somme, which saw more than 1,000,000 soldiers killed or wounded.  Also killed was Cecil Coles, a young Scottish composer.  Like Butterworth, Coles was a friend of Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams.  Holst didn’t serve, but Williams enlisted into the medical corps.  His Third Symphony (Pastoral) was inspired by a bugle call he heard during the war and, in his own words, referenced the fields of France.  And many years later Benjamin Britten wrote one of his finest compositions, the War Requiem, the text for which included poems of Wilfred Owen, written during the war.  Owen was killed in November of 1918, one week before the end of the war; he was 25.

Of the French composers, Ravel was probably affected more than anybody else.  He dreamed of being a military pilot, but his poor health and pretty short stature (he was 5’3) prevented him from joining the French Air Force.  Instead, he became a truck driver and was stationed near Verdun.  He found time to compose, and between 1914 and 1917 wrote a piano suite called Le tombeau de Couperin.  The suite consists of six parts, and each one is dedicated to a friend who died in the war.  The first piece, Prelude, is dedicated to First Lieutenant Jacques Charlot, who transcribed Ravel’s “Mother Goose”suite for piano solo.  Charlot was killed in 1915; Debussy also dedicated to Charlot a section of his suite for two pianos En blanc et noir.  Toccata, the last piece of Le tombeau, is dedicated to the memory of Captain Joseph de Marliave, husband of Marguerite Long.  De Marliave was killed days after the beginning of the hostilities, in August of 1914.  Marguerite Long played the premier of Le tombeau after the war.  You can hear it in the performance by Alon Goldstein.  In 1929, Ravel wrote a Piano Concerto for Left Hand for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right hand on the front (Leon Fleisher performs it here, Seiji Ozawa conducts Boston Symphony Orchestra).

In Germany and Austria-Hungary very little music was written during the war.  Richard Strauss wrote his rather dull Alpine Symphony and even more boring opera Die Frau ohne Schatten. Arnold Schoenberg, who was then forty, was sent to the front and  didn’t write anything of significance during the wartime.  All that Anton Webern wrote during that time were several songs.  The only composer to remain productive was Alban Berg.  He served in the Austro-Hungarian army from 1915 to 1918, and while on leave in 1917 and 1918 he wrote large parts of his first masterpiece, the appropriately macabre opera Wozzeck. 

Igor Stravinsky presents an interesting case.  Some episodes of The Right of Spring, such as Dance of the Earth or Sacrificial Dance, seem to foreshadow the war (Le Sacre was written in 1913).  On the other hand, most of the music written in neutral Switzerland, were Stravinsky’s family spent the war years, is simpler, lighter, often based on folk music.  Such are his Les Noces (The Wedding), a “ballet with voices,” the opera-ballet Renard and the musical play L'Histoire du soldat.  This development almost inevitably lead into his neoclassical period.  The order, balance, the stillness of neoclassical music were a reflection of similar trends in visual arts.  To a large extent these were reactions to the unpredicatbility, the anarchy and of course the terrible pain of the war.  In Italy and Germany, neoclassical art very soon morphed into the art of fascism.  Fortunately for us, abstract music escaped this path.