Audiences at the 1943 Proms season experienced performances of two great, very different, war symphonies.
On Thursday 24 June, the world premiere of Vaughan Williams’s serene, pastoral Fifth; then on Monday 19 July, Shostakovich’s defiant, monumental Seventh, first heard in Britain at the previous year’s Proms.
Shostakovich was in a besieged Leningrad, frozen and starving. Dark and epic, the Seventh’s narrative martial solemnity set the pattern for ‘war music’. VW, however, wrote his in the comparative warmth and comfort of Dorking, Surrey, England. His magic Fifth floats serenely, like morning haze over the Cotswolds. Any struggle – in its Romanza, inspired by Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress – is personal, internal.
A symphony can't grow potatoes - but it can do something else
Bombs were, nevertheless, pounding Britain. The 1940 Proms had been cut short by the Luftwaffe’s destruction of its base, the Queen’s Hall – the only available London venue for the 1941 season was the Royal Albert Hall, which has been the home of the Proms ever since.
Now, a symphony can’t grow potatoes or rebuild houses. But music can charge a national spirit, lift morale and perhaps help spades dig for victory or trowels spread cement a bit more resolutely. So what did Britain’s composers do to help the war effort? It’s a tale of film scores, jail terms, jam-making... and bad driving.
Vaughan Williams himself was a veteran of World War I. In 1914-18, he’d put music on pause to enlist as a private in the Medical Corps – harrowing work down in the field, even though at 42 he could have been excused. Also serving were Arthur Bliss (with distinction), Gordon Jacob, EJ Moeran and George Dyson. They survived; many young composers didn’t, the most lamented being George Butterworth.
By the time World War II, the sequel, reached Britain on 3 September 1939, life had changed. The nature of warfare had changed too. Composers weren’t expected to be wielding guns or joysticks. Pencils and batons, more like, composing and conducting music for radio, film soundtracks or morale-boosting concerts.
Composers found themselves an array of jobs
Conscripts and volunteers had their musical duties looked on favourably. Alan Rawsthorne got leave to conduct his Piano Concerto at the 1942 Proms – for which Alan Bush was similarly let off to direct his First. Edmund Rubbra was asked by the War Office to form a trio for forces concerts. Eric Fenby, composer and erstwhile amanuensis to Frederick Delius, served in the Education Corps.
Elsewhere, Gerald Finzi worked at the Ministry of War Transport and took in refugees. Ronald Binge, later to write the ‘Shipping Forecast music’ Sailing By, was in the RAF… organising events. And Victor Hely-Hutchinson, a composer who became chiefly known as a music administrator, was an Air Raid Precautions (ARP) warden.
The radio was a vital way of keeping the national chin up, and British light music’s jaunty, hummable orchestral tunes flourished. Gordon Jacob wrote humorous arrangements of popular melodies for the comedy favourite ITMA. Eric Coates’s Calling All Workers of 1940 – inspired by his wife wanting something sprightly to cheer up her fellow volunteers – became the theme to the BBC’s productivity-boosting Music While You Work.
‘Every Night Something Awful’
Live music was also important. ENSA, the Entertainments National Service Association for British armed forces, organised concerts for the troops by the leading popular performers of the day: Vera Lynn, Gracie Fields, George Formby. Jokes were one thing never rationed in wartime Britain: wags referred to it as ‘Every Night Something Awful’.
ENSA’s loftier counterpart was CEMA, the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts – highbrow maybe, but its passionate members believed in bringing serious music to everyone. They funded ‘music travellers’, principally women, to travel the country to involve amateurs in music-making and listening. A notable ‘traveller’ was composer Imogen Holst, who went on to help establish Dartington as a music education hub, and modestly assisted Benjamin Britten after the war.
Vaughan Williams, pushing 70 when the war started, served on CEMA – desk work and admin was one way composers could put their musical mojo to national use. Similarly, Lennox Berkeley worked at the BBC, where Arthur Bliss was the director of music and also served on the British Council’s Music Committee with VW and William Walton.
German music was still encouraged
ENSA, CEMA, the BBC, the British Council, the Crown Film Unit... various bodies were using music to raise morale. Home-grown works were promoted, but unlike Germany, Britain had no rigid diktats on propaganda. Nothing was compulsory, nor were ‘enemy’ composers banned.
Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, even Hitler’s ideological poster-boy Wagner, filled the airwaves and concert halls. German music was presented as noble, high-ideals, globally owned art, the product of a civilisation corrupted but which could re-emerge – an approach defended by VW in a BBC radio talk, despite some jingoistic opposition.
In fact, Vaughan Williams was one of four major composers whose contrasting wartime stories neatly show how Britain’s peace-loving creatives coped with the challenges of national duty. He was the established veteran, the other three were emerging: jazz-age one-off William Walton; boy-wonder Benjamin Britten; and idealist-dreamer Michael Tippett.
Willian Walton finds his feet
Walton was not cut out for active service. His efforts at ambulance driving ended up in ditches, thanks to his inability to double-declutch. But like others (such as William Alwyn), Walton excelled in that burgeoning new genre: film scores. After success in 1935 with Escape Me Never – which helped pay for his Belgravia house – he contributed landmark soundtracks to several wartime propaganda features including Went the Day Well?, Henry V and The First of the Few. But the syncopated energy of his previous works was giving way to solemn Coronation-style marches: Walton had unintentionally inherited Elgar’s mantle as the supplier of processional music to the nation.
He had a wary rivalry with Britten, the young genius of new British music. A few months before war broke out, Britten had gone to the US with his friend (and soon, life-partner) Peter Pears. The idea of escaping political tension was a factor, though not the only one – Britten was mainly doing what lots of late-twentysomethings do: leaving emotional baggage at home to seek new professional opportunities abroad.
Their intended three-week US jaunt ended up being three years, as authorities advised them it was too dangerous to return home. But they were homesick, unhappy in America’s hustle, and Britten’s musical earnings were so unreliable that at one point he seriously contemplated working in a hardware store.
Homophobic letters sniped at Britten's return
So return they did, in 1942, on a perilous month-long boat journey back to a much-bombed Blighty. (Comically, US customs confiscated the score of his Hymn to St Cecilia, thinking it was coded enemy messages.) Their absence hadn’t gone unnoticed by snarky letters-to-the-editor, often of a homophobic nature – nobody sniped at Bliss’s similar US absence and return.
In amongst performing at home and abroad, Britten and Pears settled in East Anglia, whose austere landscapes and looming skies – plus the poetry of George Crabbe – inspired Britten to write his own ‘war masterpiece’, Peter Grimes. The opera’s gritty drama and powerful music, as stark and sidelit as a 1940s noir, heralded a new age of British music at its 1945 premiere.
Tippett went to prison
Britten and Tippett, meanwhile, got on well, though their music is as different as their personalities. Britten: powerful shades of grey, impeccably controlled. Tippett: exuberant, flowing, colourful. Following study of Jungian psychology in 1939, Tippett decided that – as a gay outsider – his life should be dedicated to composing.
For a man of intense artistic ideals, this meant total pacifism, and he registered as a conscientious objector. His 1942 tribunal gave him non-violent options to contribute to the war effort – air raid work, fire duties, farming – but he refused them all, spending two months in Wormwood Scrubs prison as a result.
Film scores weren’t Tippett’s thing, but his wartime masterpiece is powerfully cinematic. He had always actively supported the working class and downtrodden, especially in the north of England; he also helped Morley College in London establish itself as a creative wartime music centre with amateurs and professionals working together.
Setting the horrors of Nazism to music
The day war broke out, he started A Child of Our Time: a set of laments – to his own libretto – on the injustices of the world. The violent horrors of the Nazis’ rise and their persecution of the Jews were very much on his mind, and Tippett's emotive oratorio addresses all oppression and genocide: its sections are linked by African-American spirituals, which he saw as a universal cry of suffering and defiance.
A major supporter of Tippett during his tribunal tussles was that pragmatic socialist Vaughan Williams. He testified in Tippett’s favour, saying he disagreed with his views but defended his right to have them. Privately, though, he challenged him. Dedicating yourself to pure art is all very well, VW wrote to him, but if your house is on fire you don’t write music about it, you help put the damn thing out – or else you won’t have anywhere to write music in future.
Well-to-do and way past retirement age, VW didn’t need to work during the war. But he did. And it wasn’t just committee duties, or writing letters of support to, and about, composers. He also enthusiastically dived into the unfamiliar discipline of film scores, most notably for Powell and Pressburger’s propaganda heavy-goods-vehicle 49th Parallel, whose opening – snowy Canadian mountains accompanied by rural-olde-Englande melodies – may look incongruous now.
Vaughan Williams: a good War
Nevertheless, the industrious VW produced more fine film music, his Oboe Concerto and spirit-lifting works playable by ad-hoc amateur ensembles in dusty village halls. And, of course, he completed that radiant Fifth Symphony, started in 1938 but moulded during the darkest days of war. His furious pre-war Fourth and stormy post-war Sixth often burn with rage, but the Fifth’s transcendent visions of peace and harmony caught a national mood.
VW came through the war well. (It also brought him his much younger second wife, Ursula). Richard Addinsell did OK too, though by accident. For the 1941 film Dangerous Moonlight (US title: Suicide Squadron),the 37-year-old composer wrote Rachmaninov-style piano concerto snippets, commissioned because using real Rach was unaffordable. Cobbled together as the Warsaw Concerto, the music became a huge hit, and Dambusters commander Guy Gibson later chose it as one of his Desert Island Discs on the radio.
But not everyone had a ‘good war’. The brilliant all-rounder Constant Lambert was spreading himself too thin, and the booze too liberally. Arnold Bax disappeared in well-lubricated retirement. Gerald Finzi had potentially breakthrough premieres (Dies Natalis) scuppered by the hostilities, and John Ireland’s star faded. As did Walton’s somewhat, despite those film successes.
Female composers faced their own challenges
Women composers were active too, though were faced with other challenges. Elisabeth Lutyens and Elizabeth Maconchy were among the new female arrivals enjoying Proms premieres and commissions but, whether during war or not, women expected – and were expected – to be at home with the family. The time pressures of baking and child-rearing while grappling with that development section of the fast movement often told.
Lutyens, a pioneer of 12-tone music, wrote some nevertheless whistleable works for the war effort when she and her three-child family decamped to Newcastle. But the disruption to her work, the air raids and the gas masks got her down, and she had a breakdown before rescuing her career back down in London. Meanwhile, Maconchy – in the middle of her superb series of string quartets – had her music career essentially on hold while evacuated to Ludlow.
Friends marvelled at Maconchy's ability to make jam, bottle fruit and snatch composition time between feeding her children. Grace Williams, one of Wales’s most notable composing names, was also struggling: exhausted from teaching work and the strife of conflict, she gave up composing in 1944 – fortunately, only temporarily.
Creative artists were prodded, not bullied
In his 2020 book Culture and Propaganda in World War II, John Morris writes: ‘The most striking thing about wartime composers is the quality of the film music that was produced. Not surprising from Walton, maybe – his music for Henry V was quite groundbreaking. And VW’s score for 49th Parallel also remains outstanding.
'This was the one and only Ministry of Information-sponsored feature film, and as ever VW jumped right into the project with his usual dedication, but admitting he couldn’t “Mickey Mouse” in the way that standard Hollywood composers worked. The result, however, was a certain kind of quality that hadn’t existed in film music before.’
Maybe it was the trope of muddling through, but Britain’s arm’s-length policy on music in wartime evidently worked. Propaganda was cleverly done, and well-measured; microphone not megaphone. Creative artists were prodded rather than bullied into contributing to the war effort. And composers, by and large, were allowed to do what they did best: creating music. Music that wasn’t bombastic or martial – no ‘British “Leningrad” Symphony’ – but which evoked the values that were being defended.
Vaughan Williams, Britten, Walton, Tippett and the rest wrote diverse masterpieces that reassured and inspired a nation to win through and reboot Britain post-1945. VW’s Fifth, in particular, offered emotional refuge to people in an unstable, dangerous, frightening world. Unfortunately, it still does.
All pics: Getty Images
