The Friday coming is Remembrance Day, so this week’s blogpost is about a selection of music on the themes of war, extending to composers that partook in WWI. Five is the target.
The first time I came across war-themed music was in my teens. Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima by Krzysztof Penderecki.[i] The composition for 52 string instruments, composed in 1960, was dedicated to the victims of Hiroshima when it was performed in Japan in 1964. On 12 October 1962 the composer wrote: “Let the Threnody express my firm belief that the sacrifice of Hiroshima will never be forgotten and lost.”[ii] The shrieking, metallic tone clusters of the string instruments have often been interpreted to refer to screams. Years later, I found out that atomic bomb was not the piece’s original source of inspiration: it was first called 8’37 (because of its estimated duration), a sort of experimental music after John Cage’s 4’33 example. Despite knowing this, the unsettledness of the music still haunts me to think about the story at Hiroshima.
Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, like Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, is a composition associated with WWII.[iii] From 1939 Messiaen served as a hospital nurse in the French Army, but was shortly captured by German troops and sent to Stalag VIII-A, a prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz, Germany (now Zgorzelec, Poland). Messiaen recounts his first arrival:
“When I arrived at the camp, I was stripped of all my clothes, like all the prisoners. But naked as I was, I clung fiercely to a little bag of miniature scores that served as consolation when I suffered. The Germans considered me to be completely harmless, and since they still loved music, not only did they allow me to keep my scores, but an officer also gave me pencils, erasers, and some music paper."[iv]
Messiaen completed the Quartet for the End of Time in 1941, and the composition was premiered in the camp by Messiaen (pianist) and his fellow prisoners: a clarinettist, violinist, and cellist. The composition was inspired by the New Testament book of Revelations, as Messiaen himself was a Christian believer. The music pointed to a belief in life eternal, and a new heaven, as described in Revelations 21: 1-4:
Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
As we have heard so far, war-related compositions have different compelling effects on listeners. They can make us sympathise with tragedy, hope in a better future, and speak comfort to those left behind. The latter was what perhaps Maurice Ravel was trying to achieve through his piano suite Le Tomb de Couperin.[v] Ravel started composing the suite in 1914, but stopped during his years serving in the war, and completed them in 1917. Ravel dedicated each of the six movements to friends that did not survive, one being the husband of Marguerite Long, the pianist who premiered the work in 1919. Instead of a feeling of loss, Ravel poured out in this suite memories of happiness he had with his friends. As commented by Marguerite Long, ‘Le Tombeau contains no laments or funeral-march rhythms, and that its joyful character evokes the love of life felt by all these men who died so young.’[vi] Ravel also said so himself that the suite is not to be regarded solemn: ‘the dead are sad enough, in their eternal silence’.
In the time of war, older men who were less fit but wanted to serve their country would opt for medical corps. Like his teacher Ravel, Ralph Vaugham Williams (then aged 42) served in the war as a medical orderly between 1914 and 1916, (and later in 1917, became the second lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery). It was during the time of him as an ambulance driver in the battlefield that Williams found the inspiration to write the Symphony No. 3, the Pastoral Symphony.[vii] There is melancholy amidst serenity in the music, and as he explained later in 1938:
"It's really wartime music - a great deal of it incubated when I used to go up night after night with the ambulance wagon at Ecoivres and we went up a steep hill and there was a wonderful Corot-like landscape in the sunset - it's not really lambkins frisking at all as most people take for granted."[viii]
The last on today’s agenda is the composer and pianist William Baines, whom I had not known about until I started writing this post. I came across a website about war-composers, and each of their stories is deeply moving. William Baines did not die at war; he was sent to military training camp as soon as he turned 18 in 1918, and there he caught an illness (septic poisoning) that weakened his health, and eventually died of tuberculosis in 1922, age 23. Although short-lived, Baines completed around 150 works, mostly piano solos. I have read some of these scores, and was surprised that very little is known about his works. I have printed the Four Poems and Paradise Gardens to try on the piano, recording to follow in due course!
[i] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQuFP7sLzfc.
[ii] https://www.stopwar.org.uk/article/krzysztof-penderecki-threnody-for-the-victims-of-hiroshima/.
[iii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6id-Q0kWuLA.
[iv] https://www.carnegiehall.org/Explore/Articles/2021/03/11/Five-Things-to-Know-About-Messiaens-Quartet-for-the-End-of-Time#:~:text=In%20a%20prisoner%2Dof%2Dwar,New%20Testament%20Book%20of%20Revelation.
[v] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQWY4aBIS58
[vi] https://interlude.hk/the-dead-are-sad-enough-ravel-le-tombeau-de-couperin/#:~:text=Maurice%20Ravel%20took%20inspiration%20from,enough%2C%20in%20their%20eternal%20silence.
[vii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5N2kkLMEN0.
[viii] Letter to Ursula Wood, 4 October 1938, in Cobbe, Hugh (ed.). 2008. Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 1895-1958. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 265.
Joyce Tang 