When I was a young boy, my English grandmother, Beryl Churchill, and I loved each other with a mad, inexplicable passion. She was a distant cousin of Winston's, an aristocratic suffragette who had served in the Somme in a hospital of women, which included the first female surgeons, trained in Edinburgh. She was a VAD, a volunteer who paid to serve, working the night shifts, as a third of her patients died. She told me she would slip her hand into the sheets and if they were damp with blood, she would change their bandages. For those even worse off, she would kneel beside them, grasping their hands, praying that they would live. I am her grandson in every way. I have spent years preparing to honour her experiences in the Somme and on Tuesday, June 21, we will present Sacrifice, a concert reflecting on the cultural losses from all sides. How could I have known that such a sorrowful subject would hold such beautiful music?
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Curiously, apart from the war, the river Somme is a paradise of meandering canals interspersed with wooded islands and marshes, a sanctuary for water-birds and humans alike. The shallow waters are perfect for punts and dinghies, passing scattered stone villages in the green valley between the plains. It is a perfect place for a picnic of wine, bread and cheese: to wander along and see where life takes you.
Inevitably, this leads to a cemetery filled with ex-bankers and bakers, shopkeepers, teachers, sportsmen, scholars, farmers and miners, and poignantly for culture, a welter of composers: those precious songbirds we could scarce afford to lose.
The Great War was the first war where artists flocked to fight. In England they had their own regiment: the Artists' Rifles, made up of painters, actors, architects and musicians. In France, students of the Paris Conservatoire signed up in droves to avenge the death of composer Alberic Magnard. The Germans had shot him as he defended his house, his manuscripts burnt in the ensuing fire. From 1914-18, 120 students were killed, others lost arms and so lost their dreams, remorselessly tallied in the Conservatory Gazette. It would take another war before artists became conscientious objectors. In this one, the best signed up in droves and were cut down like corn before the oncoming scythe.
Britain lost some of its finest composers: George Butterworth at Pozieres, alongside the Australians; George Wilkinson at Beaumont-Hamel; Francis Purcell Warren at Thiepval. Most painfully, Ivor Gurney, the English Schubert, an important war poet, but an even greater composer. He wrote three wonderful songs in the Somme, including By a Bierside, by candlelight in an old mortar trench, the cover page stained with mud. He served at Laventie, near Fromelles, then Thiepval, became a machine gunner, a most dangerous role, and was finally gassed at Passchendaele in 1917. Sent home to recuperate, he became suicidal; in 1922 he was committed to a mental hospital to live out his all too short life.
But what of New Zealand, the infant nation of the south? They lost their only boy: Willie Braithwaite Manson, from the Braithwaite clan of NZ musicians, picked at age 12 to sing in the Queen's Chapel Choir. At the Royal Academy of Music, he had won prizes for composing, alongside my great uncle, the musicologist Peter Latham, whose career as a pianist was ended by a bullet. On Manson's 20th birthday, the first day of the Somme, he was killed at Gommecourt by an incoming shell. The remains were never found. In all, he left us just six songs. After the war, his father founded HMV in Australia and, with the money he earned, endowed five Manson positions at the Royal Academy. New Zealand thus lost its finest composer.
Australia's great loss is Frederick Septimus Kelly, Sep to his friends. A pianist, composer and Olympic gold medal winner, the "great amateur rower of the last century". A Lieutenant Commander in the British Royal Naval Division, Kelly's last two creative acts were to finish the elegy he wrote at Gallipoli, and his final piece, a lament composed in the basement of a bombed-out farmhouse near Thiepval. A fortnight later, on November 13, the last day of that battle, he was killed in the breakthrough at Beaumont-Hamel. He had joked with his friends that he would not come back. Shot in the head, almost an hour of his music died with him, not written down, now known only as titles in his diary.
I found his lament in the National Library. Nothing had prepared me for the force of this relic. It seems to contain a great and terrible truth; noble, powerful, dark and dazzling. I took on the task of giving voice to his notes, bringing it life with the instruments he would have wished, but had not time to notate. It is a task that moves me to my core, watching the work reveal its secrets a layer at a time.
With Kelly's death, we lost one of our best and did not even know it.
Curiously in this centenary's retelling of these stories, there remains one missing voice. That of the German defenders, bombed continuously in their deep concrete shelters, slowly going mad. Johannes Schmiedgen wrote his Requiem: Das Hohe Lied vom Tod (The High Song of Death) in those dugouts, before being killed. It is the largest work from the trenches in the Great War. It should be the classic description of the German experience, but the music somehow disappeared after the 1919 premiere. If found, it would give voice to their nearly 450,000 dead. Perhaps it lies dead in a box in someone's attic. I pray it will be found, some day.
The gift that saves this story, and the concert, from unrelenting tragedy is the radiant happiness of much of the music written in the trenches. The way these young composers transformed poems into songs, depicting their love of green fields and flowers, filling their mud-corrupted world with a luminous beauty. Their music has that freshness when the spirit speaks pure, filled with "the deep heart's glow": that transcendent desire to create even on the brink of the abyss.
The last works of any composer command our attention, but even more so, those who die young. So often their final work is their calmest, a serene acceptance of what will come. They speak to the preciousness of life and their imminent sacrifice, with no self-pity.
I wish to make sense of their terrible loss, by reminding us all that war, alone, is our enemy. Let all who were lost, from all sides, be honoured. Let them inspire us to finally win peace.
Sacrifice: the Lost Voices of the Somme
High Court of Australia, Canberra, 8pm Tuesday, June 21
