1915-1919  War Music – Movement 3

During my life I had the great privilege of playing pieces written by many of the composers who had experienced the Great War first hand, and first ear.  I have already mentioned my familiarity with Vaughan Williams, but his 3rd Symphony is especially associated with his feelings about the War. Others have been similarly influenced by their wartime experiences, and particular pieces have spoken to my voice (my own individual and unique voice) demonstrating the world-changing, and lasting effect of this wasteful conflict.

I recall ‘Music for 7 String Instruments’ by the German Rudi Stephan, who died in 1915 aged 28, George Butterworth’s ‘The banks of Green Willow’, died at the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. Andre Caplet, great friend of Claude Debussy, wrote several pieces while in the trenches – ‘Le miroir de Jesus’ (completed in 1923) is the piece which has affected me most, possibly because the composer was so severely injured, and sadly I had only one opportunity to be part of that.

Then there is Paul Hindemith who wrote his 2nd String Quartet between January & April 1918 while serving with the German Army at the Western Front at Flanders.

(Fritz Kreisler)

It was only later in my life, in 1965, when my RAM student-owner Harvey Richardson was encouraged to learn some pieces by Fritz Kreisler, that I made the connection with Kreisler and the Great War.  One of these pieces, ‘Caprice Viennois’, Op.2, was written in 1917 while Kreisler was in the trenches at the Eastern Front.  It is a beautiful little piece for violin and piano, full of nostalgia and melancholy – a longing for the ‘old days’ of the romantic, reassuring life before the war.  We know that Kreisler wrote an account of the sounds he heard while serving in the trenches, and it seems he was extremely sensitive to their sonic significance, but this music came from somewhere other than this place of horror, cacophony and discord.

I am intrigued that Kreisler was the dedicatee of the Violin Concerto composed in 1910 by that ‘grand old man’ of English music – Edward Elgar. Kreisler had commissioned it too.  So, again we have an example of how musical sounds transcend national, cultural and linguistic differences – even those which had come into such stark relief in the trenches of the Great War

For me, this is such a huge contrast to the way the conflicts, questions, dissonances, and unresolved sonic progressions, mayhem and cacophony of the War were clearly influential in the works of some of the other ‘war-experienced’ composers – perhaps most notably in Arnold Schoenberg, and his pupils Alban Berg and Anton von Webern.

(Schoenberg in WW1 – bottom row, centre)

Many creative artists and thinkers are profoundly aware that this devastating War came about because of the decadence and redundancy of the ‘Romantic Period’ of the nineteenth century, and the musicians especially were facing up to the challenges of creating music which could only be understood as a reflection and as an expression of this climactic world-changing disaster we call ‘the Great War’.

Schoenberg’s ‘Jakobsleiter’, (Jacob’s Ladder), with its strong Biblical roots, begun during the war in 1915, for example, is well described as an example of ‘atonality’ on its way towards his notorious ‘12-note technique’, and Schoenberg appears to have conceived this dissonant expression as a specifically ‘German’ musical phenomenon. Schoenberg’s music can be associated directly with the horrors and carnage of the Great War, but my experience of playing other music from non-German traditions of the time, including many of those outlined above, supports the same conclusion that contemporary music reflects human trends and social upheaval, even if the principles of tonality are not abandoned.

Again, I would argue that, although national German and British cultural labels distinguished opposing elements in this War, the musical and poetic expressions coming from the conflict transcended any sense of national identity.  They brought together a unified horror, a sense of pity, a powerful expression of wastefulness which covered the whole world, especially over those nations which had specific allegiance to either the British Empire or the German Weimar Republic.  German and British music, and indeed poetry, was not known for any battle lines that separated them from each other.  On the contrary, when I played any of these works, there was an overwhelming sense of sonic unity and a musical search for unity among all the devastating damaged sounds emanating from the trenches of the Western & Eastern Fronts and the fields of Flanders and Galicia.  I think these composers can be described as ‘prophets’, pointing to the state of reality in our contemporary world using the media of sound and music.

While in the trenches, I heard that a young French music teacher, Nadia Boulanger, living very close to Delius’s home near Fountainbleau, had written to many of her students who were serving in the French forces on the Western Front, asking them: ‘Should German musicians keep their place?  Brahms and Wagner?

(Nadia Boulanger in 1925)

Apparently, she had a mixed response.  Most replies gave preference to Wagner more than Brahms, and most recognised the beauty and lasting value of Wagner’s output, especially ‘Tristan’ and ‘Parsifal’.  However, there were notable exceptions, when animosity and rejection of all things German were evident.  The harsh and dissonant word ‘Kraut’ was heard being applied to the German nation, and the popularity of Wagner, Beethoven, Strauss and Mahler throughout Europe before the War was felt to have no future at all!  Charles Koechlin (later to become a famous French composer and writer) was the most vociferous.  In all this, my body was reverberating with so much confusion and opposition – on the one hand, longings for peace and concord between nationalities (esp. German/English, but also German/French), and on the other hand, an entrenched bitterness and hatred of all heavy-handed, repetitive and emphatic dissonance.     There’s no doubt that the French ways of making and sounding music appeal more to smoother, more subtle and less aggressive experiences, and there is a perpetual struggle in my sonic frame, and in the sound of my voice which constantly seeks to reconcile these two extremes.

It’s worth repeating that my recollections and experiences in this catastrophic ‘moment’ in world history changed my voice for ever.  I feel I have been carrying the weight and tension of this ‘War Music’ in my frame ever since – a kind of perpetual crucifixion.