Throughout history, classical music has acted in response to many wars and battles. For instance, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” was about Russia’s defense against a French invasion; Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Bloody Sunday” responded to the 1905 Bloody Sunday at the Winter Palace — one of the key causes of the 1905 revolution in Russia. Regardless of the composer, the sentiments their music evoked could often draw parallels to real-world events.
“There’s often a lot of emotional turbulence in Rachmaninoff’s music,” senior Daniel Wan said. “Many of his pieces during World War I have a calm and controlled opening, before descending into a sort of craziness and then closing off on a softer note. There are also certain pieces, like the ‘Bloody Sunday’ symphony, that paint a picture, a reminder, of an event in a musical way.”
Among the composers touched by the war were Gustav Holst, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev. As opposed to previous wars centered around Europe or Asia, World War I was the first global conflict that directly impacted all parts of the world. It prompted a shift where music was instrumentalized in a systematic way — it was increasingly used as a part of a political and social movement. The interconnectedness of the large-scale war, along with technological advancements like gramophones, also allowed for a widespread audience unlike before.
“You had French composers like Ravel who would write pieces like ‘Le Tombeau de Couperin,” said Annegret Fauser, Ph.D., Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor Emerita of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “But then his piece ‘La valse’ has this cataclysmic, destructive moment when all the beauty of the waltz becomes destroyed. There’s a lot of discussion that this is actually about the destruction of culture through the war. So musicians engaged with the war on quite a wide range of things.”
