Music: The crowning merit of this compelling book, writes Harry White, is that it advances the ubiquity and sheer capacity of music to act as a sounding board of prophetic intuition and nationalist sentiment throughout the "war to end all wars".
Within the past 15 years, historians such as Paul Fussell and Modris Eksteins have broken the mould of writing about the first World War as if its significance were limited to the epic folies de grandeur of mad generals or the catastrophic re-alignments of power in Europe that soon afterwards produced a second global conflict even more terrible in its reach. Eksteins, in particular (whose Rites of Spring receives rather less than its due in this book), reads the Great War as the defining agent of modernism in Europe and prepares the way for the intense engagement with cultural history which Proof Through the Night so memorably provides.
Music is at the heart of this engagement, and the crowning merit of this compelling book is that it advances the ubiquity and sheer capacity of music to act as a sounding board of prophetic intuition, emotional duress and nationalist sentiment throughout the "war to end all wars". In this enterprise, Watkins depends fruitfully and adroitly on a vast secondary literature of more specialised studies, with the result that Proof Through the Night is (in part) a brilliant history of musical ideas publicly and privately formulated through the first two decades of the 20th century, notably in Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy and the US.
Although the principal figures in this history are musicians (and more especially composers and conductors), Watkins begins with Romain Rolland, who with every justification can be described as a musicologist. His importance in Proof Through the Night is that he committed so much of his energies not only to musical biography (including studies of Beethoven and Handel), but to fictions which were explicitly addressed to the Franco-German crisis of cultural identity - which musical composition in the late 19th century seemed to exacerbate to an almost intolerable degree. Rolland himself distinguished his veneration of Beethoven from his general indictment of German musical culture and, as Watkins points out, he urged the development of a French musical tradition that might emancipate itself from the exhausted pre-eminence of German models. "There are morbid germs in present-day Germany", Rolland wrote to Richard Strauss in 1907, "a mania of pride, a belief in itself and a contempt for others which are reminiscent of France in the 17th century". It is fascinating, to say the least, to read Watkins's meticulous reconstruction of this dawning impatience with the sovereignty of German musical culture as an expression of mounting political tensions which originated in the Franco-Prussian war, and which in turn would lead to the Somme.
Although only two of its 24 chapters are exclusively concerned with music in German-speaking lands, it is clear that Germany lies at the heart of Proof Through the Night. In a close reading of uncanny deliberation and synthesis, Watkins is able to show how composers like Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky struggled with the sheer burden and anxiety of German musical influence in ways intended to make their own contributions to musical modernism as decisively nationalistic and distinctively non-German as possible. Although it is tempting to regard many of Stravinsky's endeavours in this respect as being motivated by a characteristic opportunism and self-interest, there can be no question but that French composers, even when they quarrelled with each other on the subject of authentically "French" music, were increasingly united in their commitment to a nationalist demeanour as news of German atrocities (especially in Belgium and Alsace-Lorraine) broke through. Debussy's decision to sign his compositions with the appellation musicien français during 1915 externalises a more profound abnegation of the composer's hitherto untroubled status as French heir to Wagner. Watkins takes great care, likewise, to read the final movement of Ravel's Tombeau de Couperin (1918) not as a memorial to a victim of the War, but more specifically as a work which is mimetic of aviation and the noise of battle in the air.
There are many such close readings of art music in this book which implicitly or explicitly relate compositions by (among others) Berg, Delius, Elgar, Ives and Schoenberg to the impact of war, or the burdensome sovereignty of the German musical imagination (or both). Watkins also addresses the fantastic prodigality and influence of popular song, especially among British and American regiments (his account of 'Tipperary is exemplary), to say nothing of his brilliantly researched explanation of how the War changed the complexion of European art and popular music through the influence of African-American regimental bands. These bands took Jazz, as it were, to the Front. Almost half of the book is devoted to the US, wherein three themes predominate: the more-or-less systematic persecution of German conductors resident in America (from 1917); the continued segregation of black and white musicians at home (despite the success of African-American regimental bandleaders such as the strikingly named Lieutenant James Europe in France), and the failure of American composers to find a voice answerable to the experience of war, notwithstanding some measure of success on Broadway and (as ever) in popular song.
I don't know whether or not Prof Watkins intends Proof Through the Night as a formal contribution to musicological discourse, but I do know that the discipline of musicology is enormously enriched by this wonderful synthesis of social history, perceptive musical analysis and cultural critique. To read this book within weeks of having witnessed (with millions of others) the rather amazing spectacle of a German foreign minister chastising an American envoy because of the latter's desire for war is to understand how greatly Europe has changed in the past 60 years.
As Watkins so clearly shows, the loss of Germany's creative musical pre-eminence in the last century is not unrelated to her faded appetite for dominion. But that may be no bad thing.
Harry White is Professor of Music at University College Dublin and Foreign Corresponding Editor of the journal, Current Musicology (New York)
Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War
By Glen Watkins, University of California Press, 598 pp. No price given