Composer Veterans and Their Music

 World War I changed Europe forever. Buildings were shattered, hundreds of thousands of young men died, and another hundreds of thousands of young men were altered forever. The stresses these men endured while fighting for country and comrades left deep scars, clearly seen in the poems and other writings written during and after the war. Another artform, often overlooked, changed drastically in the years during and after WWI. While Europe settled into a new normal after the war, music shifted to accommodate its needs. Music, as a direct expression of emotion and the human psyche, gives a window of insight into the effects WWI had on composer veterans such as Ralph Vaughn Williams, Maurice Ravel, and Paul Hindemith.

 In France, music had already begun to diverge from strict tonality. This was, in large part, a reaction against the German composers like Beethoven who began to dominate French music. Norton’s A History of Western Music explains: “…after France’s defeat by German forces in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 – 71, French musicians sought greater independence from German music, seeking a distinctive path of their own while beginning to revive French music of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries as a counterbalance to the German composers who were at the core of the classical repertoire” (781). The French musical flavor developed into drifting harmonies, rich texture, and massive orchestras with as many different instruments, and thus colors, as possible. Composer like Debussy and Ravel heavily influenced the development of impressionist music in France.

Ravel’s music is impressionistic, a term often applied specifically to Debussy and Ravel’s music. This is separate from Romanticism, which, as an entire era, affected all music written during that era, no matter the nationality of the composer. Another difference, as Norton explains, is that “Rather than expressing deeply felt emotion or telling a story, as in much Romantic music, [impressionistic music] typically evokes a mood, feeling, atmosphere, or scene. As in symbolist poetry, the normal syntax is often disrupted, so that the chord progressions of common – practice harmony are avoided or attenuated” (782). In other words, while impressionistic music was often considered absolute, meaning that it does not depend on a story plot or mental image to make sense, it remains very descriptive of human experience.

 A clear example of French impressionistic music is Ravel’s Daphne et Chloe, a ballet, or as he would say, a symphonique choreographique, written from 1909 – 1912. Composed for a massive orchestra, consisting of strings in ten parts, an SATB choir, and forty-six other instruments, Daphne et Chloe is Ravel’s longest work, and widely regarded as a supreme example of orchestration. Despite the massive orchestra at his disposal, the music remains tasteful and often delicate, with rich, luscious chords. James Keller, in the program notes for the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, explains, “Rather than merely using [the orchestra] as a show of force, [Ravel] often spotlights solo players in a way that recalls chamber music” (3). Ravel, a master at pulling colors and textures from the orchestra, uses each of the many instruments in the orchestra to its full potential. Matthew De Chirico describes Daphne et Chloe, saying it is “… one of the most colorful, intricate and beautifully scored works ever written, one of the more skillfully orchestrated works in all the twentieth century” (1). Daphne et Chloe is a prime example of pre-war French music and typifies Ravel’s work of that time.

 At the outbreak of WWI, Ravel tried to enter the French Air Force, but was rejected because of his age (he was almost 40) and a minor heart complaint. Ravel, who did not feel his duty done by simply trying to join, spent the next eighteen months sending letters and trying to enlist every way he knew how. During this time, he wrote Trios Chansons, the only a cappella work in his portfolio. He dedicated the songs to the people working to help him join the army, and, months later, he enlisted under the Thirteenth Artillery Regiment as a lorry driver. Sanford, in Composers: Their Lives and Works, describes, “The conditions had a terrible effect on [Ravel’s] already fragile health – he suffered dysentery and frostbite, and was deeply affected by the horrors of war. His woes increased when his mother died in 1917” (241). Ravel expressed his woes through composition, notably the piano suite Le Tombeau de Couperin, where each movement honored a friend he had lost at war.

After WWI, Ravel, like other composers, including Igor Stravinsky, turned away from the giant, color-filled orchestras of before the war. Sanford explains, “Ravel emerged from the war exhausted and depressed, and only slowly resumed work” (241). He began to develop a newer style, one that included more atonality and was especially influenced by jazz rhythms and harmonies. Ravel, following Stravinsky’s influence, began to strip away much of the lush extravagance of his earlier compositions, instead composing for solo instruments or smaller ensembles. This movement towards sparsity was called depouillément, literally “stripping away.” Boléro, arguably Ravel’s most famous work, illustrates depouillement, taking one musical idea and repeating it over and over through various instruments for seventeen minutes. While the orchestra size is still somewhat large, Boléro remains quiet for much of its duration, and without the melodic inventiveness of Ravel’s earlier music, gives a very sparse impression. Ravel thought of Boléro as an experiment, and after it achieved such widespread fame, he supposedly commented, “I’ve written only one masterpiece – Boléro. Unfortunately, there’s no music in it.”

Ravel was commissioned by Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm during the war, to write a piano concerto. Wittgenstein was a very hard customer to please. He had commissioned other composers like Paul Hindemith and Benjamin Britten to write for him. Out of about twenty different piano concertos for left hand, Ravel’s is the only one that remains in the repertoire today. Kathy Henkel, writing program notes for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, comments, “As if to underline the usual domain of the pianist’s left hand, the exquisite orchestral scoring leans toward the rich, lower pitches of the ensemble, including English horn, bass clarinet, and contrabassoon, as well as low strings. This approach lends the Concerto a rather somber cast and an apt heroic grandeur” (2). In contrast with the only other piano concerto Ravel wrote, written simultaneously with this one, the Concerto for the Left Hand stands out for its dark tone and somber mood.

Ravel’s works immediately after the war tend to be voiced more sparsely and make use of less extravagant chords. “Dépouillement” in Ravel’s music reflected the dépouillement of all of Europe’s luxuries as they struggled to rebuild after WWI. Many years after the war, after writing many other works with a more lighthearted tone, Ravel writes his Concerto for the Left Hand with a somber, even tragic tone to it. Sanford states, “The change in musical style [after the war] was accompanied by a change in lifestyle. Ravel’s wartime experiences had aged him” (241). Ravel moved to the countryside after the war, and continued writing music, though at a slower pace than ever before. The contrast between his musical style and lifestyle marks the transformation Ravel underwent during WWI.

Before WWI, English composers, like their French contemporaries, were striving to create a national sound for England. Edward Elgar, with his Enigma Variations, had finally put Britain’s name on the list of countries that produced composers. Younger composers in Britain, like Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, and George Butterworth felt that the English classical repertoire had a long way to go. Williams studied with Ravel, wrote music based on composers from the English Renaissance, and collected folk tunes, all of which heavily influenced his compositional style. He did not fully develop his true compositional voice until his thirties, when he produced Fantasy on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, and A Sea Symphony, but his music remains a staple of English classical repertoire.

Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote his second symphony, A London Symphony in 1914. Each movement contains little bits of London. Timothy Judd, in his listening guide on The Listeners’ Club, writes, “The Symphony’s opening bars emerge from a murky London fog. We sense the quiet, nocturnal expanse of the Thames River. Out of the mist rises the warm, distant tones of the Westminster chimes, striking the half hour” (3). The symphony continues, including sounds that evoke London vividly, with folk melodies, street calls, and the raucousness of pubs. Vaughan Williams reworked A London Symphony two times after WWI, adding overtones of tragedy to the third movement, and dedicating it to George Butterworth, a promising young composer and Williams’ friend, who was killed by a sniper during the battle of the Somme.

Although Ralph Vaughan Williams was well above recruiting age, when WWI broke out, he volunteered for the Royal Army Medical Corps and drove ambulances in France and Greece. Chris Voss states, in his article “Out of the Box: Vaughan Williams’ ‘A Pastoral Symphony,’” “[he] took a posting in the Royal Army Medical Corps, which brought him face to face with some of the most brutal realities of the conflict. Night after night it was his duty to drive and wander into no-man’s land to retrieve wounded soldiers in order to cart them back to the hospitals at the rear” (2). In 1917, Williams was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery and saw action in France till the end of the war. After Armistice, Williams served as director of music for the British First Army until he was demobilized in 1919.

It took Williams a few years after demobilization to settle back into civilian life. He didn’t begin composing seriously again until 1922, when he produced A Pastoral Symphony. While this symphony is similar in texture and orchestration to his works from before the war, its subject material is much darker. This symphony does not describe the quant British countryside, as many of its listeners believed at first, but describes war torn France. Sanford states, “[Its] slow second movement features a solo trumpet imitating an army bugle, as if heard across a wide landscape in a quiet moment between relentless shellfire; and the finale is framed at its beginning and end by a solo soprano voice singing wordlessly, as if from a peaceful world that has managed to survive” (224). The beauty of the countryside and sunsets Williams witnessed conflicted with the destruction he saw every day, and he infused that conflict into A Pastoral Symphony. For while its chords are lush and full, and its melodies breathtaking, it carries a sense of deep sorrow. With the sorrowing soprano voice, it is easy to imagine the mothers, sisters, and daughters left behind, mourning the loss of their loved ones.

Ralph Vaughan Williams’ musical voice did not change as dramatically as Ravel’s did. The texture and form he used remained similar to his compositions before WWI. Instead, the music reflects an aching longing for perpetual peace and mourning for lost comrades, even while portraying the beauty of nature. He wrote two major works directly following WWI, A Pastoral Symphony, and his cantata, Donna Nobis Pacem, both heavily influenced by his experiences in WWI. Williams lived through WWII as well, staying active in civilian work by aiding refugees and organizing concerts. Throughout the rest of his life, he remained active, giving concerts and lectures, and of course writing music, often with wistful and somber undertones.

In Germany, Paul Hindemith faced a very different problem than his non-German contemporaries. While Ravel and Williams were working towards creating a musical voice for their nation, Germany already had a very strongly established voice in the works of Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and many more. Hindemith, along with other young German composers, leaned towards experimentation with tonality to develop a voice that was still German, but stood out from other music.

Hindemith was only nineteen when WWI broke out. His compositional voice had yet to develop, and his earliest works, the ones from before the war, are typical of the late romantic period. His Lustige Sinfonietta, written in 1916 and only just under four minutes long, is tonal, orchestrated for mostly woodwinds, and lighthearted. In short, it would not stand out from other music written around that time.

Hindemith was drafted into the Imperial German Army in 1917, two years after his father died fighting the war. He served in Alsace, where he played bass drum in his military band and formed a string quartet, and Flanders, where he was put on sentry duty.

After the war, Hindemith returned to composing and developing his personal compositional voice. He used baroque and classical forms for his music but filled this skeleton with strange new ideas. Behind this development lay the New Objectivity movement, where, as Gian Luigi Mattietti states in his listening guide, “an objective and linear representation of reality was reflected, in the musical field, in an overcoming of romantic aesthetics, in the return to an artisanal concept of composing, in the idea of ‘use music,’ in the recovery of a contrapuntal writing based on elementary melodic figuration and on a motoric and repetitive rhythm” (1). His series of compositions, Kammermusik, written from 1921 to 1928 for chamber ensembles, reflects his new style.  Mattietti describes, “[Hindemith] had created violent, political music, charged with tension, in which the rhythmic component, with an almost mechanical character, assumed a more relevant role than harmony, the elaboration of themes, and developments” (1). Indeed, Hindemith’s Kammermusik feels like a collection of small themes, pulled together by the pulse underneath. Many of the instruments Hindemith chooses to feature in Kammermusik are not traditionally brought to the front of the orchestral sound. Combined with his ever-growing departure from tonality, this gives Hindemith’s work a distinct flavor.

Because of the scarcity of Hindemith’s works before WWI, it is more difficult to see the distinction between Hindemith’s works before and after the war. It could be argued that Hindemith, like any young composer, simply needed more time to develop his compositional voice, represented by the change in styles after the war. Yet the influence of military bands and service is clearly heard throughout his music. Hindemith also developed an interesting musical philosophy, seeing music as utilitarian. Perhaps his years of waking and moving to bugle calls and playing in the band as the army marched were the seed of this philosophy.

Throughout Europe, music was dramatically different before and after WWI. Europe was dramatically different too. The lush luxuries of Debussy’s music, the intrigue of Elgar’s Enigmas, and the grandeur of Beethoven’s symphonies no longer resonated with the people of a Europe that had lost hundreds of thousands of its finest young men and struggled to house and feed the civilians that were left. Yet Europe still needed music to numb, if it could not heal, its wounds. So, music changed. Kennedy explains, “Music, like sculpture, had a central role to play in public and collective mourning. With the leisure that peace provided, both ex-combatant and civilian composers set to the task of writing musical memorials” (5). William’s A Pastoral Symphony served as a direct memorial of the war, while Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand remains as a memorial of all who have lost something to war but continue onwards. The more experimental works, like Ravel’s Bolero and Hindemith’s Kammermusik, reflect the uncertainty and unsettledness of the years directly after the war.  These works, with the tragedy and uncertainty they portrayed, and the hope they still contained, were more suited to healing the world’s wounds after the Great War.

While music as a whole changed after WWI, the music of composers who had fought in the war reflected this change more directly. Williams and Ravel were famous composers developing a national voice before the war, and after the war that voice wept. Hindemith, not established as a composer before the war, became a composer of such invention and political potency the Nazis forced him to flee his position as head of the Berlin music academy. These composers took their war experiences, the horrors they faced, the brotherhood they found, and the beauty of the new landscapes they saw, and turned them into works of music as complex as their experiences. Through their art, listeners get a glance of the psychology of war.

Works Cited

Burkholder, J. Peter, et al. A History of Western Music. W.W. Norton and Company, 2019.

De Chirico, Matthew. “Daphnis & Chloe – Lifelong Learning Collaborative.” Life Long Learning Collaborative, 21 Apr. 2014, https://www.lifelonglearningcollaborative.org/philharmonic/daphnis–chloe.pdf.

Henkel, Kathy. “Concerto for the Left Hand (Maurice Ravel).” LA Phil, https://www.laphil.com/musicdb/pieces/1357/concerto-for-the-left-hand.

Judd, Timothy. “Vaughan Williams’ ‘A London Symphony’: Ode to an Ephemeral City.” The Listeners’ Club, 16 Nov. 2021, https://thelistenersclub.com/2021/11/17/vaughan-williams-a-london-symphony-ode-to-an-ephemeral-city/.

Keller, James. “Ravel: Daphnis Et Chloé.” San Francisco Symphony, https://www.sfsymphony.org/Data/Event-Data/Program-Notes/R/Ravel-Daphnis-et-Chloe.

Mattietti, Gian Luigi. “Listening Guide: Hindemith’s Kammermusik #1.” Life Long Learning, 13 Oct. 2018, https://www.lifelonglearningcollaborative.org/philharmonic/close-listening-guide-to.pdf.

Sandford, Laura, and Heyworth-Dunne, Victoria. Composers: Their Lives and Works. Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2020.

WCRB | By Chris Voss. “Out of the Box: Vaughan Williams’ ‘A Pastoral Symphony.’” CRB, 29 June 2020, https://www.classicalwcrb.org/out-of-the-box/2020-01-10/out-of-the-box-vaughan-williams-a-pastoral-symphony.