Course summary

The first part of this new series explores European classical music during the First World War and its aftermath.

We commence in May 1913, where Part IV of the Music of the Fin-de-Siècle Course concluded with Stravinsky’s seemingly epoch-changing The Rite of Spring in Paris. At that point, little suggested the scale of the cataclysm that would engulf Western civilisation the following year.

Even in the early months of 1914, events remained relatively calm. Vaughan Williams unveiled the first version of A London Symphony, while Gustav Holst begins his projected orchestral suite, The Planets, with ‘Mars, the Bringer of War’.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Stravinsky finds himself stranded in neutral Switzerland. He embarks upon a series of small-scale works, including The Soldier’s Tale.

Meanwhile, Richard Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal struggle to find a suitable subject to follow their 1911 Rosenkavalier triumph. Strauss turns to a vast orchestral tone-poem describing the alpine scenery near his villa at Garmisch.

Eventually, they decide upon the familiar mythological story of Ariadne stranded on the island of Naxos. However, Ariadne’s grief is interrupted by a troupe of commedia dell’arte characters.

This intrusion, in Ariadne auf Naxos, by the comic characters revelling in the lighter, more flexible musical style of the eighteenth century, proves fortuitous. Before long, the idea is taken up by other composers. Stravinsky adapts music then believed to be by Pergolesi for his Diaghilev ballet Pulcinella, while the young Sergei Prokofiev composes his ‘Classical Symphony’ (No.1) in the style of Haydn.

Sergei Rachmaninov completes his Choral Symphony, ‘The Bells’, and composes his ‘All-Night Vigil’, before leaving Russia in December 1917 following the ‘October Revolution’ in Petrograd.

We also briefly examine ‘Futurist’ music composed in Russia, most notably Alexander Mosolov’s experimental piece ‘Iron Foundry’, or ‘Machine Music’, designed for an unproduced ballet titled Steel.

Meanwhile, the Scandinavians, Jean Sibelius and Carl Nielsen complete their numbered sequences of symphonies. Sibelius adds his Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, while Nielsen adds his ‘Inextinguishable’ Fourth, followed by his Fifth and Sixth.

In England, Elgar produces his late masterpiece, the Cello Concerto, while Vaughan Williams composes his ‘Pastoral’ Symphony (No.3). Towards the end of our period, the 21-year-old William Walton creates his ‘entertainment’, Façade, using texts by Edith Sitwell.

In Paris, Debussy composes his last works, including the Études for piano and three late sonatas, while Ravel completes La Valse and the one-act opera L’Enfant et les sortilèges. Conductor Sergei Koussevitsky also commissions Ravel to orchestrate Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’.

In the world of opera, Erich Korngold enjoys enormous success with his Die tote Stadt (The Dead City), which premieres simultaneously in Hamburg and Cologne. Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten fails to attract audiences in post-war Vienna, but soon afterwards Strauss, Hofmannsthal and director Max Reinhardt come together to found the Salzburg Festival.

Prokofiev’s satirical The Love for Three Oranges premieres in Chicago; and Busoni’s Doktor Faust premieres posthumously in Dresden. Puccini chalks up his second Met premiere with Il trittico – comprising Il tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi – and he begins Turandot.

In the early 1920s, the elderly Leoš Janáček begins a series of late operatic masterpieces inspired by his unrequited love for a much younger married woman; the first being Kátya Kabanová and soon followed by The Cunning Little Vixen.

Throughout this period, the ‘Second Viennese School’ (Schönberg, Berg and Webern) explore the possibilities of music, occasionally producing taut, angular works of surprising aural appeal. Although Berg completes his harrowing Wozzeck in 1921, it is not performed until 1925 in Berlin, where it is immediately acknowledged by many as a masterpiece.

Aims

This course aims to provide a broad overview of the major strands of European classical music during the First World War and its aftermath by exploring how the war impacted composers and their work. There is a focus on great composers including Strauss, Puccini, Sibelius, Elgar and Debussy.

The course also explores post-war stylistic shifts, including the rise of a Neo-Classical strand in composition, and introduces three established avant-garde Austrians, Schönberg, Berg and Webern, and the French group of emerging avant-gardists known as ‘Les Six’.

Learning outcomes

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• recognise the impact that the First World War had on musicians and their work
• recognise the role that music played in rebuilding trust and national confidence
• understand how the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 isolated a generation of young Russian composers from the European mainstream, while simultaneously seeming to offer them an endless range of compositional possibilities
• recognise why Rachmaninov and Prokofiev choose to leave their homeland, and why Rachmaninov ceased to compose during the period, becoming instead a concert pianist, to support his family
• identify and understand the shift from Late Romantic to Neo-Classicism during the early 1920’s
• appreciate how the new lighter style for ‘serious music’ captivated audiences, encouraging them to engage with this music

Content

• Vaughan Williams’ ‘London’ Symphony – both original and revised versions

• Debussy’s last works – 12 Études for piano, and the 3 late sonatas

• Berg’s Three Orchestral Pieces, Op.6

• Satie’s first orchestral score for his Diaghilev ballet Parade

• Rachmaninov’s Choral Symphony, ‘The Bells’, and his ‘All-Night Vigil’; and Prokofiev’s ‘Classical’ Symphony

• De Falla’s Diaghilev ballet The Three-Cornered Hat, and Nights in the Gardens of Spain for piano and orchestra

• Ravel’s suite for piano Le Tombeau de Couperin

• Stravinsky’s ballet Pulcinella for the Ballets Russes

• Visits by the Ballets Russes to London and Monte Carlo

• Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony, Sibelius’s Seventh, and Zemlinsky’s ‘Lyric Symphony’

• Holst’s suite ‘The Planets’, and Walton’s Façade

• Elgar’s Cello Concerto

• Vaughan Williams’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony

• Ravel’s re-orchestration of Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’

• Respighi’s ‘The Pines of Rome’, complete with recorded nightingale!

• Stravinsky’s ballet-cantata Les Noces

• Schönberg’s Serenade, Op.24, and a series of miniatures by Webern

• A selection of shorter works by members of ‘Les Six’

• Bartok’s String Quartet No.2

• Opera premieres 1:

  • Busoni’s double-bill of Arlecchino and Turandot
  • Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos – both in its first version, following Molière’s comédie-ballet Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, and the well-known second version, complete with a new, fully-sung Prologue; also Die Frau ohne Schatten and the ‘autobiographical’ Intermezzo
  • Bartok’s much-delayed Duke Bluebeard’s Castle
  • Korngold’s Die tote Stadt
  • Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges

• Opera premieres 2:

  • Puccini’s La rondine, and Il trittico: Il tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi
  • Janáček’s Kátya Kabanová and The Cunning Little Vixen
  • Posthumous premiere of Busoni’s Doktor Faust
  • Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges
  • Berg’s Wozzeck

Who this course is for

This course should appeal to music lovers keen to understand how classical composers and musicians managed to survive the cataclysm of the First World War, while continuing to develop their skills despite the exigencies of the time, especially in Germany and France.

Prerequisites

None

Delivery style

Lecture style, face-to-face, with musical excerpts played on CD.

Materials

A weekly worksheet with comprehensive synopses of the material being presented is provided.

Recommended reading

Composer biographies

The most rewarding book suggested for this course is Harvey Sachs’s Schoenberg: Why He Matters (2023).

Many of the composer titles listed below belong to an excellent series called ‘Master Musicians’, published by Oxford University Press:

• Anderson, R. (1993) Elgar. London: J.M. Dent / Oxford University Press.
• Budden, J. (2005) Puccini: His Life and Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Day, J. (1998) Vaughan Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Griffiths, P. (1992) Stravinsky. London: J.M. Dent / Oxford University Press.
• Kennedy, M. (1999) Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Layton, R. (1965) Sibelius. London: J.M. Dent / Oxford University Press.
• Norris, G. (2001) Rachmaninoff. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Ross, A. (2008) The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. London: Fourth Estate.
• Sachs, H. (2011) Schoenberg: Why He Matters. New York: Liveright.
• Taruskin, R. (2009) Music in the Early Twentieth Century, Vol. 4, The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.