World War II in Music from Outside of Russia. Commemorating the 75th Anniversary of the Victory

Abstract

Everybody is well familiar with the musical chronicles of World War II created by Soviet
composers, which are exclusively significant in their artistic merits. But usually our perceptions
of what was written in the 1940s by composers outside of Russia are not so concise. The list
of such works is significantly high and, just like in Russian music, the most important positions
were held by the genre of the symphony: Arthur Honegger’s Second Symphony, Ralph Vaughan
Williams’ Fifth Symphony, Roy Harris’ Fifth Symphony, Bohuslav Martinu’s Third Symphony, as
well as programmatic works in the genre – Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s “Tragic Symphony,” Josef
Stanislaw’s “Red Army Symphony,” Max Rubin’s “War and Peace Symphony,” Henri Sauguet’s
“Expiatory Symphony,” Arthur Honegger’s “Liturgical Symphony,” etc. Musical compositions in
various choral and vocal-symphonic genres were broadly represented: Luigi Dallapiccola’s “Canti di
prigionia,” Darius Milhaud’s “Cantate de la guerre,” Goffredo Petrassi’s cantata “Coro di morte,” Vít
Nejedlý’s cantata “Tobě Rudá Armádo,” Ernst Krenek’s “Cantata for Wartime,” Francis Poulenc’s
“Figure Humaine,” Alfredo Casella’s “Missa Solemnis ‘Pro Pace’,” Paul Hindemith’s “Requiem
‘For Those We Love,’” Arnold Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw,” etc. This multitude of
mentioned and unmentioned compositions must be joined by two outstanding musical scores
created by our compatriots who lived at that time in the USA: Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic
Dances” and Igor Stravinsky’s “Symphony in Three Movements.” The first of them was being
created when the world was just immersing into the abysm of the catastrophe – particularly this
poignantly topical situation determined the directedness of Rachmaninoff’s conception, which may
be defined by the paradigmatic phrase “war and peace.” Stravinsky’s symphony was written at the
end of World War II, when the wartime harvesting campaign had to a certain extent already become
the habitual destiny for the planet, so the composer brings out to the forefront the idea that “war is
work,” or, in other words, “a la guerre comme a la guerre.”

Keywords: World War II, its chronicles in the music of composers outside of Russia,
Rachmaninoff's “Symphonic Dances,” Stravinsky’s “Symphony in Three Movements.”