The Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts by Anne-Marie Einhaus & Katherine Isobel Baxter

Author:Anne-Marie Einhaus & Katherine Isobel Baxter [Einhaus, Anne-Marie & Baxter, Katherine Isobel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474401630
Google: o8YxjgEACAAJ
Amazon: 1474401635
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T01:11:13.307000+00:00

14

REQUIEMS AND MEMORIAL MUSIC

Kate Kennedy

THE FIRST WORLD WAR is now remembered primarily through its literature. The response of classical musicians to the war, both during and after the conflict, is less familiar. It was more difficult (though not impossible) for composers to write music whilst on active service, and the majority of music written during the war was composed by those too old or unfit to serve. These pieces are a barometer of the needs of the time, serving a public need as well as being a vehicle for private emotion. Older composers who were not called upon to fight, such as Edward Elgar, Charles Villiers Stanford and Hubert Parry, felt strongly that they should write works that met the general populace’s need to mourn, commemorate, celebrate and raise spirits. There were even calls in journals for composers to write ‘the piece of the war’ that might speak both for and to the British people, such as the Musical Times’s article in which a non-musician combatant called for a ‘composer of genius’ to write a Bugle-Call Symphony, which would create ‘a work of real national importance by taking three or four of the most expressive [bugle] calls and enlarging symphonically on the meaning which they are supposed to convey’.1

Despite such appeals for a single musical utterance there were as many different musical responses to the conflict as there were varied and changing attitudes to the war. Pieces were, in the case of Arthur Bliss’s Morning Heroes (1930), written to exorcise a deeply personal grief or guilt, whilst still serving a public purpose of bringing together large forces to mourn and contemplate loss en masse. Other composers wrote more intimate works, drawing on their own experiences of the war to create pieces that expressed their own very personal relationship to the event. They were not necessarily combatants; war compositions were inspired by civilians’ losses as much as by the experience of fighting. Herbert Howells, who was too ill to fight, wrote an elegy for strings and viola in 1917 in honour of his friend Francis Purcell Warren, a budding composer and accomplished viola player, who had been killed. Frank Bridge was deeply affected by the war although he did not serve, and struggled to reconcile it with his pacifist beliefs. His Piano Sonata of 1921–4, dedicated to the memory of his friend the composer Ernest Farrar, is a stark contrast to his pre-war work. It ushered in a new era for Bridge’s composition, just as the war itself altered the society around him irrevocably. At the expense of alienating his audience, he had written a work that was a dark and deeply turbulent reflection on the conflict. His Sonata was the result of years of condensation of thought, but his musical response to the war had also been immediate. In 1915 he had read about the torpedoing of the Lusitania, and had written a disturbing Lament dedicated to a girl who had been a passenger on board and who had drowned.

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