EMERGING VOICES: Those Who Were Lost

This is the fourth in a series of posts I’ve written as part of the Emerging Voices project which is happening at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society the next two weeks. Specially, it is in relation to the Lost Voices concert. For more information about the project, please visit: https://www.pcmsconcerts.org/projects/emerging-voices/

The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 brought the years of the Belle Époque to a violent and abrupt end. Once the fighting started, it was only a matter of weeks before Parisians found the war at their doorstep in September’s battle of the Marne. Once the Allies had stopped the German advance, the armies stalled, and the stalemate of trench warfare ensued. The next four years would see horrifying carnage, scarring everyone who lived through the ordeal. Millions would die, leaving few unaffected, and stifling many of the new voices that had begun to make themselves heard in the decade before the war. 

Nadia Boulanger and Claude Debussy had similar creative reactions to the war in the winter of 1915, both composing settings of their own texts: Boulanger with Soir d’hiver and Debussy with Noël des enfants qui n’ont plus de maisons. Boulanger’s song, about a woman waiting with her infant son for her husband to return, begins quite bleakly, but has more of a tinge of hope than Debussy’s angry song giving voice to the children of France who were left orphaned because of the brutal civilian casualties. Debussy’s song, which has an accompaniment not unlike artillery and a simplistic, childlike vocal line, was the last he would compose. He would finally succumb to the colon cancer that had plagued him for the last decade of his life, amidst the shower of aerial and artillery bombardment of Paris, in March 1918, six months before an armistice was declared.

One civilian death that shook the music world was that of Spanish composer and pianist Enrique Granados. Among the many opera premieres at the Paris Opéra foiled by the war was Granados’ Goyescas, inspired by the paintings of Francisco Goya. The work instead premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1916. Delayed by a recital at the White House, Granados' return to Spain required him to go to England and then cross to France. A German U-boat torpedoed his ferry across the English Channel, breaking it in half. Granados managed to board a lifeboat but drowned while trying to save his wife, who had been tossed into the sea by the force of the explosion.

Nationalism was central to Granados’ musical aesthetic, manifesting itself in both his choice of subject matter (for example, the many works based on Goya’s paintings), as well as the Spanish musical styles he wove into his compositions. His collection of tonadillas is perhaps his best-known vocal composition. While the pieces sound like arrangements of traditional Spanish songs, they are, in fact, original compositions.

In the cases of Lili Boulanger (Nadia Boulanger’s younger sister) and Ivor Gurney, it is commonly speculated that the effects of war shortened their lives significantly. Both suffered from poor health before the conflict began. Gurney, who fought in the trenches and was severely injured in battle twice in 1917, showed signs of mental-health issues in his late teens. After enlisting, he began writing poetry while serving on the Western Front. Severn and Somme (1917) and War’s Embers (1919) detail his experiences of war, as well as homesickness for his childhood home of Gloucester. In September 1917, Gurney was gassed during the third battle of Ypres; it has been posited that a long-term effect of this was a severe deterioration of his mental health. In 1922 he was declared insane and institutionalized. He continued to compose music and poetry for a few more years and the setting of what is likely his own text, Western Sailors, is one of his last pieces.

Lili Boulanger suffered from poor health from early childhood: At three years old, she had been diagnosed with “intestinal tuberculosis” (which we would now identify as Crohn’s disease). Having won the prestigious Prix du Rome competition in 1913, the demands on Boulanger were already many when the war broke out, as she was busy composing to fulfill the terms of her prize. Once the fighting started, she poured herself into the war effort, spearheading the Comité Franco-Américain du Conservatoire National to support musicians at the front. Her diaries of this period note committee meetings nearly every day, and her correspondence during these early war years was prolific. It is often speculated that the exhaustion she suffered from her committee work, combined with her musical efforts, hastened her physical decline. She died at the age of 24 on March 15, 1918 – just one week after the premiere of her song cycle Clairières dans le ciel, and only ten days before the death of Debussy.

Boulanger had begun work on Clairières in 1913, shortly after winning the Prix du Rome, and finished the cycle sometime during the first two years of the war. The cycle tells of a young and inexperienced man reminiscing about his relationship with a young woman. While a break-up is never mentioned, the narrator looks back with nostalgic sadness on the relationship. The final song is the first clue to the freshness of the relationship’s end: he opens by noting that the next day will mark a year since the couple’s first meeting. Only in this final song is the rawness of his emotional experience revealed. Here, Boulanger employs a brilliant structural technique inspired by Gabriel Fauré’s cycle La bonne chanson to illustrate the pain of these memories: she fills the last song with musical quotes from each of the previous twelve, each seamlessly flowing into each other with alarming speed. While this technique creates a dream-like effect in both cycles, Fauré’s more resembles a pleasurable, drug-induced high. Boulanger’s is more like a nightmare, perfectly illustrating the utter devastation of her protagonist. 

In Clairières dans le ciel, we get a sense of Boulanger’s highly developed harmonic language, which is quite forward-looking, expansive, and filled with shadings of chromaticism that make it seem like harmonies are implied rather than explicitly expressed. Its compositional boldness leaves us to wonder: how would she have continued to grow and push musical boundaries had her life not been cut short?