Music in the First and Second World Wars

When History Interrupts Music

The history of music tends to be told as a succession of styles, schools, and languages: the Baroque gives way to Classicism, Romanticism to Modernism, tonality to atonalism. It is a history of ideas. But there are moments when history with a capital H — the history of peoples, wars, and regimes — bursts into that narrative and breaks it from within.

The two world wars were those moments. Between 1914 and 1918, and again between 1939 and 1945, Europe experienced the greatest catastrophes of its modern history. And the composers who lived through those decades could not carry on as though nothing had happened: they could not continue writing heroic symphonies or intimate lieder without asking themselves what it meant to make music in a world that had produced the trenches of the Somme, the extermination camps of Auschwitz, the firebombing of Dresden.

The responses were as different as the composers who gave them. Some used music as propaganda. Others as resistance. Others as elegy. And some, the most radical, came to ask whether music — as they had known it — still had the right to exist.

The First World War: The End of a World

The Great War of 1914–1918 did not only kill ten million people. It also killed a way of understanding the world: Enlightenment optimism, faith in progress, the conviction that European civilisation was the pinnacle of human history. The young men who entered the trenches carried that faith with them. Those who survived came out without it.

For music, the impact was equally profound, though more silent. Many of the most promising composers of the generation died in combat: the French Albéric Magnard, the British George Butterworth, the German Rudi Stephan. Their works remained unfinished or unknown, and it is impossible to know what they would have given to twentieth-century music.

Those who survived came out transformed. The Claude Debussy who died in 1918 — while German guns were shelling Paris — was a broken man, dying of cancer and devastated by the war. His last sonatas, written in that period, have a fragility and economy of means that seem to reflect a world coming apart. Maurice Ravel tried to enlist several times and was rejected on grounds of height; he ended up driving trucks at the front, an experience that marked him forever.

In Germany and Austria, the war accelerated the end of late Romanticism as a viable musical language. It was difficult to go on writing with the grandeur of Mahler or Strauss in a world where that grandeur had also served to send millions of men to their deaths. The crisis of musical language was not only aesthetic: it was also moral.

Music as a Weapon: Propaganda and Mobilisation

Both world wars used music systematically as a tool of mobilisation, propaganda, and control. This is a chapter of musical history that makes us uncomfortable, because it forces us to look squarely at something the heroic narrative of art prefers to ignore: that music, like any language, can be placed in the service of the most brutal power.

In the First World War, national anthems and military marches performed a function of social cohesion and emotional mobilisation that no political speech could equal. In every belligerent country, composers wrote patriotic music: in Britain, Elgar; in France, Saint-Saëns; in Germany, a long tradition running from Beethoven — appropriated, as always, for causes he would never have endorsed — to Wagner, whose Germanic nationalism found its most brutal expression in the war.

In the Second World War, the instrumentalisation of music reached a new scale. The Nazi regime made German music — and in particular Wagner and Beethoven — the emblem of supposed Germanic cultural superiority. Concerts in the concentration camps — where prisoners were forced to play while others were executed — represent the darkest point in this history: music turned not merely into propaganda but into an instrument of humiliation and death.

On the other side, Stalin's Soviet Union had its own way of controlling music. Socialist realism was the official doctrine: music must be accessible, optimistic, in the service of the people and the State. Composers who did not conform to that standard lived under permanent threat.

Shostakovich: Living and Composing Under Terror

Dmitri Shostakovich is perhaps the composer who best embodies the tragedy of the artist trapped between his conscience and a totalitarian regime. Born in St. Petersburg in 1906, he spent his entire adult life under Stalinism, and his work is an extraordinary document of what it means to make art under conditions of terror.

In 1936, Stalin attended a performance of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and did not like it. Two days later, the official newspaper Pravda published an article — unsigned, but clearly inspired from above — condemning the work as 'chaos instead of music'. For Shostakovich, who was living in the same period when thousands of intellectuals and artists were disappearing into the gulags or being shot, that review was a possible death sentence. He withdrew his Fourth Symphony, already in rehearsal, and replaced it with a Fifth that was, apparently, a work of affirmation and celebration.

But was it really? The finale of the Fifth Symphony — a massive and apparently triumphant crescendo — has been interpreted alternately as genuine Soviet affirmation and as barely disguised sarcasm, a triumph so exaggerated that it becomes its own opposite. Shostakovich never clarified it in his lifetime, and perhaps could not. His music had to learn to speak two languages simultaneously: one for power, another for those who knew how to listen.

His Seventh Symphony (Leningrad, 1941), written during the German siege of the city, became a symbol of Soviet resistance. It was performed in Leningrad in August 1942, while the city had been under siege for months and people were dying of hunger: the orchestra musicians were so weakened that some had to be brought from the front or from hospitals. The symphony was broadcast on the radio and heard across the Soviet Union. In that moment, it was much more than music.

Britten, Messiaen, and Testimony from the Horror

Not all composers responded with war symphonies. Some chose the path of more intimate, more personal, more disturbing testimony.

Benjamin Britten, the great British composer of the twentieth century, was a declared pacifist and refused to write patriotic music during the Second World War. His War Requiem (1962) — though written years after the war — is one of the most devastating musical documents of the century: it interweaves the Latin text of the Requiem Mass with poems by the British soldier Wilfred Owen, killed in combat in 1918 one week before the armistice. The juxtaposition of the liturgical Latin and Owen's verses — which describe the horror of the trenches with a precision that no euphemism can soften — creates a work of brutal honesty about what war does to men and to the institutions that justify it.

Olivier Messiaen wrote his Quartet for the End of Time in 1941 in a German prisoner-of-war camp, Stalag VIII-A in Görlitz. He composed it for the four instruments available among the prisoner-musicians — violin, clarinet, cello, and piano — and it was premiered before four hundred prisoners and guards in January 1941, in below-freezing temperatures. The work, based on the Book of Revelation, is not a war piece in the conventional sense: it does not describe battles or express patriotism. It is a meditation on time, eternity, and transcendence. But the context in which it was written and premiered gives it a dimension that no concert hall can fully reproduce.

After Auschwitz: Can Music Still Exist?

The philosopher Theodor Adorno's statement — 'to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric' — is perhaps the most quoted and most misunderstood of the twentieth century. Adorno was not saying that art must cease. He was asking whether art that continued as though nothing had happened — that ignored the horror, that went on producing decorative beauty — was not itself a form of complicity.

For the composers of the generation that survived the Second World War, that question was existential. How to compose after having seen what human beings are capable of? How to use the same instruments, the same forms, the same language that had also served to numb consciences and glorify murderous regimes?

The answers to that question are the starting point of the blog's Era V: the music of the second half of the twentieth century. The radical avant-garde of Boulez and Stockhausen, which decided to begin from zero and build a musical language with no links to the contaminated past, was one of those answers. Not the only one, but the loudest and most influential in the first years of the post-war period. That story begins in the next post.

"Music cannot change the world. But it can change the people who can." — Dmitri Shostakovich (attributed)

Listening Suggestions

• Seventh Symphony (Leningrad) — Shostakovich: listening to it knowing it was performed in a besieged and starving city adds a layer of meaning that no analysis can replace.
• Fifth Symphony — Shostakovich: the great enigma. Affirmation or sarcasm? Listen and decide.
• Quartet for the End of Time — Messiaen: one of the absolute masterpieces of the twentieth century. To be listened to in silence and with full attention.
• War Requiem — Britten: monumental and devastating. Wilfred Owen's poems in counterpoint with the liturgical Latin produce one of the most moving musical experiences in the modern repertoire.
• Songs and Dances of Death — Mussorgsky/orchestration by Shostakovich: a song cycle about death that Shostakovich orchestrated in 1962, adding a layer of his own time to music from the nineteenth century.