Eighty Years Later

What are you going to listen to?

Music that has a connection to World War II continues to fascinate. Perhaps not only to commemorate, but also to realize that the horrors of war are still wryly current daily.

Funeral

Haydn lived well before World War II, but he too experienced war at close quarters and even wrote music for it. He composed his Kaiserhymne in 1795 to keep up the morale and loyalty of the Austrian people to the Habsburg Emperor against Napoleon's advancing troops. When the battles with the French indeed took place, he wrote his Missa in tempore belli (Mass in times of war), religious music with a lot of militaristic touches.

His Symphony No. 44 of 1772, however, is an entirely different story. It was one in a long series he wrote for his patron the Prince of Esterházy, where he served for thirty years. It is one of his very few symphonies in minor and, for Haydn's purposes, a work with rather violent emotional traits that appeal to his "Sturm und Drang. The symphony was given the nickname "Trauer" only decades later because Haydn once let slip that he would like the slow movement to be played at his funeral. But let that movement be precisely the most lovely of the entire symphony.

Hope and despair

As a German composer, Karl Amadeus Hartmann experienced the rise of Nazism in his country, a regime he detested. He made this aversion clear by refusing to allow his music, which was full of political commitment, to be performed in his own country anymore. The Nazis, for their part, banned his music. But outside Germany, his works were all the more famous. It made him one of the few German composers after the war who were "pure in heart," which helped his fame at home considerably. One of the works he composed even before the war was the Concerto funèbre for violin and strings. It was created in the fall of 1939 at the time of the German invasion of Poland. According to the composer, it is music that reflects the "intellectual and spiritual despair of the times. The composition consists of four movements that flow into each other. Parts two and three are mainly about the anger and powerlessness in the face of the cruel and ruthless Nazi regime that plunged Germany into an unholy war. But the two corner parts have a different atmosphere. Especially the ending, a delicate chorale based on a Russian song singing the praises of the victims of the crushed revolution of 1905, was for the at heart socialist Hartmann an expression of hope that one day all would be better.

Most treasured string quartet

When World War II was over, the rulers of the Soviet Union wanted to exuberantly express triumph over victory, and so many composers wrote their heroic victory works. Not so Shostakovich. His Ninth Symphony of 1945 was more of a joyful nod than a tribute to the Red Army. Much more tragic in mood was the Third String Quartet a year later. Here Shostakovich showed how he had really experienced the war. It is a composition with emotional extremes with a friendly innocent-looking beginning, two rebellious scherzos, a funeral march and finally a finale that dies away in a gloomy open ending. To make it still something heroic, he initially gave titles to each movement such as "The forces of war unleashed" for the third movement, or "In memory of the dead" for the fourth movement, but he deleted them afterwards. Both works met with strong criticism from the authorities, and he quickly withdrew them. But for him himself, the Third String Quartet has always remained one of his most treasured string quartets.

As with so many of Shostakovich's string quartets, Rudolf Barshai, conductor and well-known advocate of Shostakovich's works, made an arrangement of this quartet. By adding winds, harp and celesta, he gives the piece a richer hue that makes the intensity of the music all the stronger.

Kees Wisse