The strains of patriotism

In times of war and national crisis, when words alone don’t express our deepest griefs and hopes, we turn to music -- from classical to popular -- to convey and relieve collective emotion.

In the awful and ongoing wake of Sept. 11, symphony orchestras have performed healing repertoires by composers from Giuseppe Verdi to Samuel Barber. Members of Congress joined voices across the aisles in Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” Bruce Springsteen was inspired to write his best work in years. And some fans and disc jockeys banned or burned discs by the Dixie Chicks.

The use of music as a focal point for national pain, pride and politics is nothing new, as Glenn Watkins shows with thoroughness and brilliance in “Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War,” a scholarly and dramatic analysis of the cultural-political roles that music played in Europe and America before, during and after World War I. From the German concert hall to the English music hall, from French cabarets to the trenches of no man’s land, music was a form of aesthetic munitions for the nations involved in that monumental conflict, writes Watkins. And that cultural battle, the author shows, began long before the first bullets were fired in the autumn of 1914.

Though Europe was outwardly at peace in the early years of the 20th century, many observers, Watkins notes, then felt “that the Franco-Prussian War had settled nothing and that another war was both certain and imminent.” Musicians, poets and painters could be found in the vanguard of those crying out for it: “Germany’s military buildup had already commenced under the facade of Kultur.... The Futurists in Italy were calling for war as ‘the world’s only hygiene,’ and the French artist Marcel Duchamp was heard shouting, ‘We need the great enema in Europe. And ... if we need war, we need war....’ ”

At the same time as some argued that music (such as Beethoven’s 9th Symphony with its “Ode to Joy”) should serve as an international language for communicating in peaceful unity, others urged their countries’ composers to define a unique national identity through their scores. Debates raged in music journals and artists’ broadsheets, in conservatory curricula and on symphony programs. “[I]t has been contended,” Watkins writes, that “the war of 1914 was prepared for [in France] as much in the cafe-concerts as by the general staff.”

Discerning a national musical identity was especially tricky for France, where the old church-state order was at cultural war with those upholding the more egalitarian ideals of the Revolution. This led to such Gallic controversies as the counterpoint-versus-harmony battle. Some French scholars differentiated between “the canonic German repertoire” of Bach (whose counterpoint they claimed as the basis of serious composition) and the more modern (and suspect) inroads made by the Austro-German Expressionists led by Arnold Schoenberg. Other partisans scorned the counterpoint crowd as religious (anti-Semitic) bigots and opted for harmony (with its “rational and scientific basis grounded in the Enlightenment”) as being truer to the spirit of the republic.

Things got even trickier (and nastier) once World War I began. And, as Watkins notes, “[c]onfusion was obviously king in this war of aesthetics”: Although Jean “Cocteau ... called for a ‘French art for Frenchmen’ and went so far as to refuse a German brand of toothpaste,” that poet-provocateur “also acknowledged that to be deprived of the music of Beethoven and Schubert was unthinkable.” Beethoven, beloved of listeners, critics and composers alike, posed a particular problem. Debussy and others were relieved, then, by the timely “discovery” that Beethoven was not German after all but Flemish -- by dint of his grandfather’s having been born at Malines.

“There was no escape hatch for Wagner, however,” Watkins writes, “and the veneration almost universally accorded him in France during the fin de siecle almost totally disappeared. Debussy, following a considerable personal struggle, now attempted to bypass Wagner, judging that his glory was based solely on the fact that he summarized centuries of musical formulas....”

Meanwhile, Debussy was attacked in print by Cocteau, a supporter of Erik Satie, who “attempted to relocate Debussy outside the French tradition and even to paint him as a successor to Wagner.... [N]o allegation could have been more damning in the war climate.”

The most violent cultural reactions occurred, it seems, in the United States, the last country to enter World War I. The 1917 furor over the falsely alleged refusal of Karl Muck, Swiss-born German conductor of the Boston Symphony, to begin a concert with the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the newly designated American national anthem, led to Muck’s imprisonment for a year as a “dangerous enemy alien.” European musicians seeking refuge and engagements in the U.S. during and after the Great War, including Sergei Rachmaninoff, found it prudent to perform “The Star-Spangled Banner” as proof of their American loyalty.

Eventually, audience members at concerts and other events were required to stand at attention, hats removed, when the anthem was played. “At a Victory loan pageant held on 6 May 1919 in Washington, D.C.,” writes Watkins, “a man was shot in the back three times for refusing to rise for the playing of America’s newly proclaimed national anthem. The next day the Washington Post reported that as the victim fell to the ground ‘the crowd burst into cheering and handclapping.’ ”

Only a few years earlier, an isolationist America had embraced such popular antiwar songs as “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” Once the U.S. joined the fray, some of the same Tin Pan Alley composers who’d penned pacifist tunes (including Irving Berlin, with his “Down Below”) rallied to the cause with flag-waving fare including Berlin’s “Let’s All Be Americans Now” and George M. Cohan’s classic “Over There.”

If any nation can be said to have benefited culturally from the Great War, it was the United States, which used the opportunity of war to begin to mold an indigenous music. One of the most fascinating and stimulating sections in this consistently fascinating and stimulating work recounts the triumphant journey abroad of the African American Hellfighters of the 369th Regiment, a group of fighting musicians led by Lt. James Reese Europe, which reached France on New Year’s Day 1918. The Hellfighters distinguished themselves equally on the battlefield and in the concert stadium.

After the armistice, Europe’s regiment was awarded France’s bravery medal the Croix de Guerre: “And when the final tally was made, it was discovered that the 191 days the regiment had spent in action was the longest stretch served by any group of American soldiers ... during the Great War.” Of equal import were the many concerts Europe and his men played before thousands of enthusiastic spectators: “[P]rograms that featured Sousa’s ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ and ... finished with ‘Memphis Blues’ invariably brought down the house. ‘Jazz spasms’ and ‘ragtimitis,’ to use [band member Noble] Sissle’s words, worked the crowds into a frenzy. France, which had previously ‘gone ragtime wild’ over performances by John Philip Sousa in 1900, now came down with a high fever.”

There are dozens more stories of equal significance in the epic “Proof Through the Night,” such as those about well-known composers (Ravel, Elgar, Schoenberg, Hindemith) eager or forced to don uniforms -- and of how the war influenced their later and sometimes greatest work. There is the story of the performers, including the Scottish music-review star Harry Lauder (whose own son died on the Somme), who went to the front to entertain troops, and of the often grisly songs the troops themselves made to cling to sanity and keep perspective in the teeth of the slaughter. There are stories of masterpieces created in the wake of the Great War: from Alban Berg’s unsettling opera “Wozzeck” to Benjamin Britten’s retrospective and compelling “War Requiem.”

Generously illustrated throughout and supplemented with a CD of musical selections, “Proof Through the Night” is a scholarly triumph, an important history and a moving narrative. Watkins’ formidable work sends ripples through the mind, inspiring a reader to extend the book’s plot beyond its covers, past the Paris peace conference where World War I’s victors drew a map of a Middle East that continues to vex them, all the way to Los Angeles in the 1930s, where several cultural survivors of the Great War (from Schoenberg to Stravinsky) took eventual refuge during the next global conflict -- and where a veteran of the Canadian Scottish infantry composed novels in a violent and jaunty prose-music crafted at least partly in response to his World War I combat experience in France. “Once you have had to lead a platoon into direct machine-gun fire,” wrote Raymond Chandler, “nothing is ever the same again.”