The Doomed Generation

How can we imagine all of the horror that the WWII left behind. The level of physical destruction that the war shows was extensive, the world and its inhabitants seemed literally to have been torn to pieces. Music after war suffer perhaps, it biggest change in its aesthetics. The general statement was to rebuild a new musical world out of the ashes and horror of WWII. The task was taken by young composers whose own experience with the war made this change possible.
It seems that this generation of post-war composers were at the same time, living the duality of have all the freedom to make musical discoveries but at the same time, the darkness mood that the war left was dangerously faced them with the crude reality of finding “nothing”.
The wartime devastation and the beginning of the atomic age after the 1945 treaties exacerbated the pessimistic and subdued tone. The new tendency in arts was looking for a total distrust with the past. The physical and cultural ruin that the war caused could be only reconstructed with a radical break and make possible a new start.
Composers like Messiaen, Stockhausen and Xenaquis was leading these radical changes in post-war aesthetics. Their own experience with war makes them fearless and their stylistic search reach large scales. The new aesthetics were leaving completely behind the old classical traditions. New laws were being writing. Music started to become more violent, direct and crude. New tools and stylistics recourses was being used to change for completely music structures. Fierce rhythms, total serialism, indeterminism, futurism, silence as a unitary musical motif, complexity, density, all of this new musical forms were reflecting the darkness of the post-war mood but at the same time was opening the gates to a new whole world of musical experimentation.
It was in these extraordinary circumstances that one of the most emblematic compositions of the war times took place. During 1940, Messiaen was captured by the German army and imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp. Since he was with three other professional musicians, a violinist, a cellist and a clarinetist, he decides to use this peculiar ensemble to create his, Quatuor pur la fin du Temps . The quartet was premiered in Stalag VIII-A in Gorlitz, Germany, outdoors in the rain on January 15 of 1941 with an audience of about four hundred fellow prisoners of was and prison guards. Although the piece according to some scholars could remain peripheral by comparison to other Messiaen’s works like the Turangalila Symphony, its major importance remains on the historical context that give birth to it and in its special significance for the composers that belong to the war generation.
The piece is inspired by a text from the Book of Revelation (Rev 10:1-2, 5-7, King James Version). The piece is divided in eight movements and each of them has a special quotation made by Messiaen. The piece reflects Messian stylistic mélange and it is build base in his own ideas in theory and harmony. The first harmonies in the piece certainly have a crystal quality and although it has some frenetic moments in general the mood in the piece remains very reflexive and obscure. It is a perfect representation of what must have seemed like the end of times.

Shostakovich and the infinite sadness....

Knock, knock, who’s there? The NKVD…  

Shostakovich was one of many Russian composers that, during Staling times, suffer of censorship and constant fear of being arrest, exile of worse. His work was labeled of being intentionally discordant, muddled or extremely formalism for the state aesthetics. This abuse made Shostakovich’s life a living hell for many years.

During these times many of Shostakovich’s friends, patrons and family members, suddenly disappeared, drowned into the maelstrom of Stalinist repression. It is amazing how Shostakovich managed to keep, in a way, his sanity and at the same time, write some of the most remarkable music.

Shostakovich, according to many scholars and biographers, was an obsessive man. Full of strange habits, tics and grimaces. He was, certainly, very vulnerable and receptive, an important feature of his genius. It is unimaginable how a man like him could survive all the repression and horror of Stalin’s era. His life, like most of his compositions, were full of antagonism, at the beginning of his musical career, Shostakovich make his debut as a state composer, but, later in his life, he developed a love-hate relationship with the state.

Shostakovich composition style has two different directions, the extreme neo-classical and the heroic. The Cello Sonata in D minor for cello and piano Op. 40, was writen in a particular difficult time in Shostakovich’s life, He was in a period of emotional turmoil. This sonata is formed by four movements. The piece is full of the duality that a composer like Shostakovich was suffering by being trapped in a totalitarian system. As part of his latest works, this piece is full of statements more responsible and profound in its nature. The humanism and tragic lyricism of the sonata struggle with the concept that the artist cannot survive by retreating into a private creative world; he must be part of the socio-political problems, however bitter the experience were.

His face reveals a troubled man, struggling with his interests and his duty as an artist, his music, undoubtedly, reveals this concerns. In his cello Sonata, the first movement begins with accompanying and flowing piano arpeggios. As the musical tension arrives we can hear the themes, unusual and full of shifts but, tonal. Both instruments imitate each other during the piece, and, from the beginning we start to hear the development of a strange and insidious rhythmic motif, penetrating to our spine and through the flowing textures of the themes. Then is there, tataTA, tataTA, it starts in the piano like a whisper, almost an eco and then, is finally taken by the cello. First in pizzicatos and then, take it to its full sonority, it almost sound like someone knocking at the door, using the rhythm ostinato as a peculiar password. Knock, knock, who’s there…..?