Postcard from Minneapolis

The Maddening Music of War

Minnesota State Opera, Silent Night; Lewis Milesone/Great River Film Orchestra, All Quiet on the Western Front; G.W. Pabst, Westfront 1918, Kameradschaft; Rose Ensemble, Empire, Religion, War, Peace: Music from the 30 Years’ War

I arrived here in the Midwest just in time for the mid-term elections, closely followed by Remembrance Day weekend and the centenary of Armistice Day. The atmosphere was one of polarisation: international, national, regional, political, economic, social, cultural and along the usual battle-lines of race and gender. If anything this sense of division was even more marked after the elections, leaving the country starkly divided between White House and Congress, Senate and House, urban/suburban and rural electorates, progressive internationalism and reactionary nationalism  – divisions mirrored in rainy Paris by the respective speeches of the French and American presidents (not to mention the squaring off between America and China back in my home region at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Papua New Guinea).

The works I saw in my first two weeks here – and my response to them – were somewhat overshadowed by this sense of national and global confrontation.  

Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell’s Silent Night was originally commissioned and produced by Minnesota State Opera in 2011; the score subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize, and the work has since had dozens of productions in North America and Europe – including nine this season, perhaps not unsurprisingly in the centennial year of the Armistice. The original production was recently revived by the MSO at its home venue the Ordway Centre in Minneapolis; and it’s here that I saw it the week after Remembrance Day. 

Based on the screenplay for the 2005 French film Joyeuse Noël, the opera commemorates what is possibly the one incident in the First World War that almost everybody has heard of: namely, the brief spontaneous truce that broke out on Christmas Eve in 1914, when German, French and British troops laid down their weapons and celebrated Christmas together – only to resume obediently killing each other the next day on the outraged orders of their respective High Commands. I instinctively avoided seeing the film when it came out, but was prepared to give the opera a shot, if for no other reason than to hear composer Kevin Puts’s award-winning score. 

Sadly neither score nor libretto of Silent Night is remotely in the same league as other significant twentieth-century anti-war or anti-fascist musical offerings like Britten’s War Requiem, Tippet’s A Child of Our Time or even (more debatably) Gorecki's 'Symphony of Sorrowful Songs' – all of which notably use 'found' musical or textual material (the poetry of Wilfred Owen in the case of Britten, African-American spirituals in the case of Tippet, and Polish folk songs as well as an inscription on the wall of a Gestapo prison cell in the case of Gorecki) in order to anchor the works in an authenticity and immediacy of reference which also (especially in the case of Tippet) paradoxically enables them to transcend their contexts and speak to themes of atrocity and injustice across time and space with deeply felt horror and anger as well as sorrow and compassion. Of course because they were composed for churches or concert halls such works also have the advantage of eschewing any direct dramatic representation of their respective narrative content; as such they obey a kind of secular taboo on images by keeping the obscenity of that content properly off-stage while using music and words alone to stare relentlessly into the abyss.

In comparison with these precursors the failings of Silent Night are all the more conspicuous. Most perplexing is the almost perverse absence of any direct rendition of the actual Christmas carols sung by the German and Allied troops – not even including ‘Silent Night’ itself – which would have provided the obvious musical and dramaturgical germ for the entire opera. Possibly this decision was made in the interests of compositional integrity; however I could detect no other authentic original voice amidst the clamour. Instead the musical style of the work is a kind of melange of various national genres or references to ‘typical’ composers: Wagner, Debussy, Mahler, Elgar and a rather laboured pastiche of Mozart (or possibly Gluck) in the opening scene – which rather implausibly takes place in a German opera house in 1914 where a performance is interrupted and the leading tenor conscripted onstage (in front of his wife who is also the lead soprano) when perhaps the more merciful act would have been simply to shoot him on the spot and dispense with an increasingly superfluous romantic subplot. 

This ‘everything-but-the-kitchen sink’ stylistic approach pays obvious homage to the nationalities of the characters, whose musical and dramatic personalities in turn are little more than emblematic of their respective homelands. However it does so only at the cost of reducing both music and drama to one or at most two dimensions: national origin in the case of the music, with the schematic addition of military rank, social class and romantic or familial relationships in the case of the characters. As such the score suffers from a kind of academism and even historicism which borders on the musical equivalent of l’art pompier; indeed when the Scottish soldiers began singing in bad Highland accents I was seized with an urge to call the fire brigade immediately. At times I wondered if I was watching a Broadway musical with a title like Western Front Story– or perhaps a Hollywood remake of Joyeuse Noel.

As for the structure of Mark Campbell’s libretto, I couldn’t help suspecting that it had been all-too constrained by the screenplay on which it was based. The alarum bells went off in the opening scene, which introduced our two opera-singer romantic leads Nikolaus Sprink (tenor Myles Mykkanen) and Anna Sorensen (soprano Karin Wolverton), who both sang well enough (though I found Wolverton’s voice a little grating) but were scarcely needed as a musical or plot device, and about whose relationship or fate I could not have cared less, in comparison with the soldiers and officers who were surely the opera’s real subjects. 

Among the latter, the most convincingly written (and performed) both musically and dramatically in terms of subtlety and complexity were the German-Jewish Lieutenant Horstmayer (baritone Joshua Jeremiah) and the French Lieutenant Audebert (baritone Edward Parks), along with the Scottish Lieutenant Gordon (Christian Thurston – struggling manfully with his accent). All three in different ways convincingly navigated and expressed their ambivalence towards the war and their assigned task in it, and in the case of Horstmayer and Audebert were also given simple but touching backstories. 

Indeed for me the most effective and moving scenes in the opera occurred after interval in the Second Act: firstly when the three officers agreed to extend the truce on Christmas Day to bury their dead and exchanged amicable if halting (and comic) trilingual small-talk on the battlefield (the English surtitles lending additional irony to the exchange); and later when individual soldiers from the ensemble sang haunting extracts from letters home in their respective languages on Christmas Night. These scenes justified and made use of the material and its form as a multilingual opera, and both score and libretto (as well as the players of the Minnesota Opera Orchestra under Courtney Lewis’s sensitive conducting) rose splendidly to the occasion. They also provided moments of much-needed stillness and contemplation in the otherwise somewhat hectic direction and staging of Eric Simonson – as well as Francis O’Connor’s picturesque revolving set, which looked like an illustration from a children’s book or museum diorama, complete with dead trees and the ruined façade of a church that wobbled slightly whenever the revolve came to a standstill, and huge projected flags on scrims (in case we were in any doubt about the nations involved).

In sum: I couldn’t help feeling that the popularity of Silent Night had more to do with its mostly pre-modernist and user-friendly score, its Broadway-style libretto and staging, and its sentimental, slightly pious and falsely consoling message, than any actual achievements as a work of contemporary opera. Perhaps there’s something about the so-called ‘Great War’ itself – and more specifically the story of the Christmas Truce – that inspires a kind of Edwardian nostalgia for a mythical time at the close of the Age of Empire when everyone still knew their place and a certain chivalry still prevailed. Such nostalgia is especially evident in Anglophone countries (not least Australia, with its Anzac obsession); but it also informs the more resentful and reactionary forms of nationalism that led to the ensuing catastrophe of the Second World War – and which in various forms still plague us globally today.

*

Down the street from where I’m staying in the cosy inner suburb of Longfellow, the tiny local non-profit art-house Trylon Cinema commemorated Armistice Day weekend with two benefit screenings of the lesser-know silent version of Lewis Milestone’s 1930 epic All Quiet on the Western Front to raise money for Minnesota veterans, alongside two even more powerful and newly restored anti-war classics from 1930 and 1931 by the great Austrian theatre and film director G.W. Pabst: Westfront 1918 and Kameradschaft (Comradeship). All three packed far more punch than Silent Night – and in the case of All Quiet also included a far more effective use of live music. 

The film was originally released in two versions: the better-known talkie and a (somewhat re-edited and slightly shorter) so-called International Sound Version which included music and sound effects but removed the American-English spoken dialogue and replaced it with inter-titles for an international audience. The silent version is arguably superior both because of its tighter, more fluid and expressive editing (silent cinema being at the time a much more advanced art-form than talkies) and because it dispenses with the dialogue, much of which was lamely delivered by the actors and in any case sounded somewhat incongruous coming from the mouths of German soldiers and French civilians. 

The Trylon screenings however went one better by dispensing with the music and sound effects as well, and replacing these with a semi-improvised live accompaniment by The Great River Film Orchestra, comprising local Twin Cities musicians Keith Lee on baritone guitar, piano and autoharp (a kind of zither), Nathan Grumdahl on drums and synthesizer, and Matt Sowell on electric lap steel guitar and industrial equipment. 

The original soundtrack’s essentially pre-war, classical-romantic and alternately militaristic or elegiac orchestral style has an unfortunate tendency either to sentimentalise or even glorify war, much like the soundtracks of so many war and even anti-war movies since (a tendency that arguably extends to the score of Silent Night). Indeed this is arguably one reason for Truffaut’s paradoxical remark that he had never seen an anti-war film that didn’t end up being pro-war. The Great River Film Orchestra however treated us to a much more hand-held, expressionist and even contemporary industrial sound, which suited both the material and the medium. 

The result was like watching a horror film, the visceral impact of which was considerably increased by the music being performed live in semi-darkness in front of the screen, and largely improvised in response to the images projected there. This was especially the case during the remarkably staged and filmed battle and bombardment scenes, when the moaning chords of the autoharp and plangent howls of slide guitar mingled with the crash of cymbals and drums, and the machine–gun rattling of industrial junk percussion; but it was no less telling in the earlier scenes of jingoistic street parades and enthusiastic recruitment-sessions in school classrooms, which were more starkly underscored by ominously sustained piano-chords; as well as during the interludes of ceasefire, on furlough and in the hospital barracks, which were hauntingly accompanied by the slide guitar.

Despite some of the more predictable elements in the essentially generic content of All Quiet (which after all virtually invented the genres of both Hollywood war and protest-movies) I left the cinema much more shaken than I had been by Silent Night. The early recruiting scenes in particular (and their eerie musical accompaniment) had me immediately thinking about the bellicose nationalism and militarism currently being preached in the US, Russia, China and elsewhere around the world, and fearing lest history repeat itself with even more catastrophic consequences.

*

Although probably most famous for his silent Pandora’s Box with Louise Brooks (based on Wedekind’s Luluplays), G.W. Pabst came into his own in 1930–31 with a trio of great social-realist sound films: Westfront 1918, Kameradschaft and a controversial version of Brecht and Weil’s Threepenny Opera which was the subject of a lawsuit by the playwright and composer but made a movie star of Lotte Lenya. Certainly Pabst is a much more significant film-maker than Milestone, and German cinema was far more advanced than Hollywood in the early 1930s – and indeed arguably led the world in that art-form until the catastrophe of Nazism, from which (like Pabst himself) it never recovered, until the brief blazing flare of Fassbinder and rise of the New German Cinema in the 70s. 

Westfront tells a similar story to All Quiet – about the physical and mental impact of the war on a group of friends in the German army who are progressively disillusioned, wounded, maimed, killed or driven insane by the conflict – but it does so in a much bleaker and more horrifying way, and uses much more advanced techniques such as long complex overhead tracking shots through the trenches and the deliberate absence of visual perspective during the chaotic battle scenes. Certain images leave an indelible imprint: the death of one of the main characters in a shell-crater leaving only his hand sticking out of the mud; another driven mad and dragged from battle shouting ‘Hurrah!’ while saluting piles of corpses; and a final scene in a field hospital that seems to come straight out of a medieval vision of hell as depicted by Hieronymus Bosch – or perhaps an etching by Otto Dix, Pabst’s contemporary and fellow practitioner of the so-called ‘new objectivity’ in art that succeeded expressionism in the latter years of the Weimar Republic. The closing image of a blinded French soldier reaching out unwittingly to hold the hand of a German – who has just died and been covered by a sheet on the stretcher beside him – and murmuring ‘Comrades, not enemies!’ is both hopeful and hopeless at the same time (recalling Kafka’s saying that ‘there is hope, but not for us’) even as it evokes the title of Pabst’s next film, which is effectively a sequel to this one; yet even this image is followed by the closing title with its chilling question mark: ‘The End?’ (In this regard it’s worth remembering that Armistice Day is just that: the commemoration of a cessation of hostilities – albeit with onerous terms for the German side – rather than a formal surrender; an anomaly which contributed to the fact that ‘the War to End All Wars’ in a sense never ended – much like the American Civil War which is arguably still being waged by white supremacists to this day.)

The French-German co-production Kameradschaft more or less picks up where the previous film leaves off, but is even more technically sophisticated and perhaps ultimately more humanist in its narrative and vision. Set in a town on the French-German border in the immediate aftermath of the war, it tells the story of a group of German coal miners who risk their lives coming to the rescue of their French counterparts who are trapped in a neighbouring mine after a gas explosion. The film combines realism and expressionism even more effectively than Westfront 1918, and deliberately evokes imagery from the latter in scenes such as the terrifying domino-like collapse of the mine-supports (recalling a claustrophobic scene from the earlier film in which the German soldiers struggle to keep their trench-supports from collapsing during a bombardment) or –hauntingly – when an oxygen-starved French miner sees his German rescuers approaching him wearing gas-masks and has a flashback to the trenches, leading him to attack them in his delirium. Yet if the penultimate scene of Kameradschaft – in which a mass-meeting of survivors leads to expressions of solidarity from both sides – ‘We are not enemies, we are all workers!’ – is more optimistic and politically charged than anything in Westfront, it is nevertheless followed by the bleak image of French and German border guards re-installing the metal grille that separates the two nations even underground (and which the German miners had kicked asunder earlier in the film to reach their French counterparts). 

Unlike either the sound or silent versions of All Quiet, both Pabst films tellingly have no music at all in the soundtrack, other than the diegetic use of cabaret music with which the French villagers entertain the German troops in an early scene of Westfront – a scene paralleled in Kameradshaftwhen the German miners enter a local music-hall in the French part of town, and a misunderstanding leads to a fight when one of them is snubbed by a French woman. Pabst had a much more nuanced understanding of the role of music in theatre, cinema and politics – as well as the psychology of nationalism, war and conflict, and the socio-economic conditions that fuel them – than Milestone (let alone the composer and librettist of Silent Night). Artistically he had lived and worked as a theatre director and actor in New York before the War, and was interned in a French prisoner-of-war camp on his return to Europe, where he formed a theatre group inside the camp; politically he made no secret of his Marxist affiliations (at least until the Nazis took power), and later faced at first-hand the compromises imposed on him by both the Nazi and Hollywood regimes; so he had skin in the game when it came to the subject-matter he was drawn to as a film-maker throughout his career. 

As such, his films have a great deal to tell us about our contemporary situation, which in many ways alarmingly resembles the era of economic precarity and intensified nationalism that preceded and led to both World Wars.

*

From opera to silent film with live musical accompaniment to sound film with minimal music, I finished my ‘week of war’ with an experience of pure music (vocal and instrumental) by local Twin Cities early music group The Rose Ensemble, in collaboration with the Augsburg University Choir and early music ensemble Dark Horse Consort, performing a program of music entitled Empire, Religion, War, Peace: Music from Europe’s 30-Year Conflict, 1618–48. 

The concert was performed at three different churches; I saw it at the magnificent and recently restored neo-Romanesque Church of the Assumption in downtown Saint Paul – a Catholic church founded by German immigrants fleeing persecution poverty and persecution in search of a better life in the mid-19^thCentury. So the performance had a visual component as well: one which, like the music itself, had a soaring beauty while also indirectly reminding us of its enduring religious (and sectarian) context and history.

The program included works by Bach’s great German precursor Schütz (who travelled to Italy where he was influenced by Gabrielli and Monteverdi) as well as other contemporary German composers who wrote work in response to the conflict – all of it in the service of their respectively Catholic or Protestant Princes and thus heavily partisan, but much of it of surpassing spiritual beauty or deeply rousing in a way that transcends the circumstances of its composition. 

The works were given glorious and passionate voice by the ensemble and choir, with outstanding work from tenor Bradley King, mezzo-soprano Alyssa Anderson, and the clear soprano of Kristina Boerger, who also conducted the Augsberg Choir. They were given delicately rich support by the Dark Horse Consort’s variously sized sackbuts (early trombones, more or less) and sweetly tuned cornettos (which are like curved wooden trumpets with finger-holes) – all resounding in the majestic acoustics of the church.

The performance was a timely reminder that 2018 is also the 400^thanniversary of what was arguably the first ‘modern’ war in that it involved virtually all of Europe’s major powers; was at least ostensibly waged in the name of ideology (in this case religious) even if in fact largely driven by power-politics and fought by indistinguishable armies of mercenaries; and saw the death of over 8 million people – or about a sixth of the population of Europe, including over a third of the population of the German and Czech lands – either in battle or from violence, plague and starvation. 

Unlike the both World Wars however – or even the American Civil War – there are only written (and artistic) records of the conflict. This makes it a fascinating object for imaginative contemplation – as Brecht did with Mother Courage, which was based on the 17^thCentury German writer Grimmelshausen, whose picaresque novel Simplicissimus fictionalised his own experiences in the war, but which Brecht used to hold a mirror up to the role of capitalism in the Second World War.

In this case the Rose Ensemble allowed us to close our eyes and imagine the war and its impact for ourselves, with the aid of a spoken narrative thread interspersed between the musical items, delivered at a lectern by individual members of the ensemble and drawn from contemporary personal accounts by Schütz himself as well as a Swabian cobbler-farmer Hans Heberle (who kept a diary during the war after seeing a comet and interpreting it as a sign of his mission to record what he saw) and the Polish-German poet Andreas Gryphius, who witnessed horrific atrocities against civilians and wrote about them with unsurpassed lyricism. As he wrote in his poem ‘Tears of the Fatherland’, which was read during the concert (in English translation): 

So, now we are destroyed; utterly; more than utterly!
The gang of shameless peoples, the maddening music of war,
The sword fat with blood, the thundering of the guns
Have consumed our sweat and toil, exhausted our reserves.
Towers are on fire, churches turned upside down;
The town hall is in ruins, the strong cut down, destroyed.
Young girls are raped; wherever we turn our gaze,
Fire, plague, and death pierce heart and spirit through.
Here, town and ramparts run with ever-fresh streams of blood.
It's three times six years now, since our mighty river's flow
Was blocked almost by corpses, just barely trickling through.

I found the cumulative experience of this concert – music, narration, architecture, the context of Armistice Day and our contemporary times of trouble – a deeply moving cause for reflection and culmination of the week's performance-going. As the German-Bohemian composer Andreas Hammerschmidt’s motet ‘Verleih uns Friede’ (‘grant us peace’) implored in the words of Martin Luther at the concert’s conclusion:

In your mercy grant us peace, 

Lord, in these our times.