Classical musician fatalities in World War I

[piston]

We've all seen relatively short lists, always heavily British in content, and not clearly distinguishing between fatalities, other casualties , and composers who, while occasionally or potentially at risk, were not direct combatants (Ravel, RVW, Hindemith, Webern, Schoenberg, etc.). The following list mostly includes classical music composers and performers who served as combatant and who were either killed in action, went missing in action, or died from wounds sustained in action. It also includes a few civilians who were killed because of military action. There probably remains a source/language bias detrimental to information from the eastern European front but it's still a much more exhaustive list than anything else you'll find on the internet!

As always, feel free to contribute additional information. I am aware that several composers, such as Arthur Bliss, were wounded at the front, and that others such as Andre Caplet and Yvor Gurney probably died prematurely because of WWI trauma, but I have decided not to include here all war-related casualties.

8/24/1914: Musicologist Joseph de Marliave is killed in action at Senon; husband of Marguerite Long and dedicatee of the last movement of Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin.
9/3/1914: French organist/composer Barthelemy-Louis Cadot (28), killed in action between Drouville and Courbesseaux.
9/3/1914: French composer Alberic Magnard killed in an armed civilian defense of his family and estate.
9/7/1914: Georges Kriéger, French organist/composer, missing in action at the Battle of Courbesseaux.
9/9/1914: Hungarian composer Aladar Rado (32) is killed while fighting at Boljevce, in Serbia. Musical America devotes an article on the loss of a great talent and refers to his two operas, symphonic poem, and string quartet.
11/14/1914: Belgian pianist/composer André Devaere died from wounds sustained at the Battle of Saint-Georges-sur-l'Yser.

2/19/1915: French musicologist and music editor Jules Ecorcheville (42) killed in action in Champagne.
5/7/1915: Irish composer O'Brien Butler, a passenger on the Lusitania, dies near the coast of Kerry, "where the first act of Muirgheis is laid."
5/9/1915: British cellist and conductor Edward Mason (36) killed in action.
6/2/1915: German composer Botho Sigward killed in action on the eastern front, in Galicia.
6/4/1915: British composer Charles Denis Browne is killed in action on the Gallipoli peninsula.
6/21/1915: French composer of light operas Joseph Conte is killed in action in Arras.
7/18/1915: French organist Louis-Marie-François Andlauer is killed in action at Mareuil.
9/16/1915: German composer Fritz Jurgens (27) is killed in action in Champagne.
9/29/1915: Rudi Stephan, German neo-classical composer of great promise, is killed in action at Tarnopol, on the eastern front.
[November 1915: Alban Berg fails his military training due to constant asthma attacks and "bronchial catarrh." He will soon be assigned to desk duties.]

3/24/1916: Enrique Granados (48) and his wife are among the fifty passengers who perished on the British mail boat S.S. Sussex, when it was torpedoed on its way across the Channel. 138 other passengers were rescued.
7/1/1916: Willie B. Manson, a RCM composition student from New Zealand, is killed in action on his birthday, on the Somme.
7/1/1916: British composer and folk dancer George G. Wilkinson(31) is also killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
7/3/1916: Francis P. Warren (21), another RCM composition student, is reported missing in action at Mons.
8/5/1916: Death of George Butterworth (31), a most promising British composer, killed in action on the Somme.
[10/7/1916: Maurice Ravel is hospitalized and operated on because of dysentery; he will eventually receive a temporary discharge.]
[10/20/1916: Arnold Schoenberg is discharged from the Austro-Hungarian army because of chronic asthma attacks.]
11/13/1916: Australian pianist/composer Frederick S. Kelly (35) is killed in action on the Somme, shot in the head by a sniper.
[12/21/1916: Webern is declared unfit for military duty due to his deficient eyesight.]

4/20/1917: British organist/composer Frank M. Jephson (30) dies from wounds sustained in battle at the military hospital of Etaples.
5/16/1917: Jewish-French composer Fernand Halphen (45) succumbs to a front-related illness after serving for two years as captain in the 13th territorial regiment.

3/21/1918: Death of British baritone Charles Mott, killed in action during the Second Battle of the Somme.
5/18/1918: Death of Toivo Kuula, Finnish composer and conductor, following a brawl between local German and Russian factions.
5/26/1918: Scottish composer Cecil F. G. Coles is mortally wounded in an attempt to rescue casualties in a wood near the Somme.
6/1/1918: Czech composer Jaroslav Novotny (32) is killed in action in a skirmish with the Red Army.
9/18/1918: English composer Ernest B. Farrar (33) is killed in action on the Somme only two days after reaching the front.
10/15/1918: American violinist David Hochstein (26) is killed in action during the Meuse-Argonne offensive.
10/20/1918: French organist/composer/choirmaster Joseph Boulnois (34) is killed in action at Chalaires.
10/20/1918: French organist/composer Roger Boucher dies from wounds sustained in battle at the Paris military hospital.
11/15/1918: Belgian composer Georges Antoine dies from a trench-related pulmonary disease as he watched the liberation of Bruges.

[david johnson]

Thanks. That was interesting. I knew very little of that.

[John F]

Most of them I don't recognize even by name. Magnard and Granados, of course; and the Englishmen Butterworth and Mott. It could have been much, much worse.

[piston]

And I have omitted other names, particularly French names, that cannot be found on the internet but were mentioned at the time, such as by Saint-Saens and his patriotic followers, as musicians who had perished on the front lines.

Let's not forget that the survivors are better known because they ... survived and composed after the war. Second Lieutenant of the 13th Battalion of Royal Fusiliers Arthur Bliss would also be completely unknown today if he had not survived his extremely dangerous position of leading charges on enemy lines. He was injured on 7 July 1916, recovered, and returned to the front line where he was gassed at Cambrai in 1918. Once demobilized, he had nightmares for the next ten years but persisted in writing a music that his peers viewed as rather "modernist" and unconventional during the inter-war years. His Morning Heroes is considered a precursor of Britten's War Requiem.

Fritz Kreisler is certainly very well remembered, no? Previously a reservist for Austria's Third Army Corps, he had resigned his commission two years before the beginning of WWI but immediately reported for duty in the first days of the conflict. He was sent to fight the Russians and, after four weeks in the trenches, was wounded in the thigh by a Cossack charge, hospitalized in Vienna and Baden, and pronounced an "invalid ... physically unfit for military duty." Amazingly, Kreisler's war experience was already published by Houghton and disseminated across the neutral USA in 1915!

Others survived the war, almost from beginning to end, by being valued as soldier-musicians and thus somewhat sheltered from trench warfare. After 14 months of fighting in the trenches, Lucien Durosoir, international concert violinist before the war, found relative safety from bullets, shrapnel and gas when French General Mangin encouraged him to form a quartet or quintet, to temporarily take his soldiers' mind away from the carnage. The core of this ensemble was composed of Durosoir, at the violin, Caplet, at the viola, and Maréchal with his home-made cello. All three survived the war but are not that well known because of how years on the battle fields "broke" them to some extent, particularly Caplet who did not survive long after the conflict. Opting for nearly complete seclusion from the artistic world after the war, Durosoir kept composing but never sought to publish anything. He wrote some forty unpublished works between his demobilization and his death in the 1950s. Recently discovered, many of these works are just now being published and recorded on the Alpha label:
http://www.durosoir.com/Revue-de-presse.html
From left to right, Maréchal, Caplet and Durosoir:

[John F]

It may be tempting to speculate on what might have been, but I don't do that much. More to the point to think about what actually happened.

[piston]

It isn't speculation when, in cases like Rudi Stephan, it is based on facts, both during his life and long after his death. His opera, as recorded in Frankfurt in 1952, was uploaded on yt a month ago. His few orchestral works have been recorded by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. In fact, nearly everything he wrote in his twenties, including several songs, has been recorded:
wikipedia

Rudi Stephan (29 July 1887 – 29 September 1915), was a German composer of great promise who shortly before the First World War was considered one of the leading talents among his generation. He died in the war aged 28.

Stephan was born at Worms, Grand Duchy of Hesse. He became a composition pupil of Bernhard Sekles at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt and of Heinrich Schwartz and Rudolf Louis in Munich, where he settled after completing his studies in 1908. He left only a few works: his liking for pointedly neutral titles along the lines of 'Music for ...' has caused him to be seen as a forerunner of the 'New Objectivity' of the post-war era, but his music is in fact in a hyper-expressive late-Romantic idiom which has more plausibly been seen by some as a kind of proto-Expressionism. His father, a Privy Councillor, was able to finance the performance of his early works, which at first met with incomprehension, but the premiere of his 1912 Music for Orchestra in Worms was a major critical breakthrough. He completed his only opera, Die ersten Menschen, shortly after the outbreak of the war, and it was eventually premiered in Frankfurt, five years after his death from a bullet in the brain fired by a Russian sharpshooter, at Chodaczków Wielki near Tarnopol on the Galician Front, now Ukraine.

His complete orchestral works have been recorded by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra conducted by Oleg Caetani.

List of works
Opus 1 for Orchestra
Liebeszauber for baritone and orchestra, after Hebbel (1907, rev. 1911)
Music for Orchestra [No. 1] (1910)
Grotesque for violin and piano
Music for Violin and Orchestra (1910, rev. 1913)
Music for Seven Stringed Instruments (2 violins, viola, violoncello, doublebass, harp and piano) (1907–11; unfinished revision for piano quintet, 1914)
Music for Orchestra [No. 2] (1912, rev. 1913) [NB this work is often said to be a revision of the 1910 Music for Orchestra, but they are in fact unrelated]
Die ersten Menschen (1909–14), opera after the erotic mystery-play by Otto Borngräber

[piston]

This is the "counter-torpedo" ship commanded by Jean Cras during the war, often in the Adriatic Sea:

On this ship, he orchestrated his opera, Polyphème, and he further wrote his really beautiful 2 Paysages pour piano (one maritime and the other terrestrial), his impressionistic Ames d'enfants for orchestra, and four dances for the piano.

Now that ship, in addition to rescuing sailors from torpedoed ships and also coming to the rescue of Serbians in need of transport, was in the hunt of German and Austrian U-Boats. It isn't clear if Cras did destroy one of those "animals," as he called them, the evidence tending to indicate that he did not. But one of his duties was to set extremely explosive and volatile submarine mines, called the Marseille, which could explode even when they weren't set up. On one such missions, a submarine mine gently touched the hull of his boat and exploded, killing one man and sending the commander flying over board, unconscious, into the water. When Cras came to back to his senses, in the water, he saw a sailor drowning next to him and saved his life.

Most of Jean Cras's best works were composed during and after World War I. His ship could have been torpedoed, with all hands lost, as so often happened. Or he could have died as a result of said explosion.

It is really fascinating that a highly decorated French Navy commander then admiral was also a composer. Not something you'd find anywhere today, I dare say.

His opera was a success in Paris, in 1922. Very Debussy-like, with the love triangle theme, it includes some really nice orchestral interludes.

[piston]

I think that Toivo Kuula, Jean Sibelius' first composition student, should also be included as a fatality of World War I. What may seem to be a murder, at first sight, was actually the outcome of a conflict between the Finno-German (the Jagers) and Finno-Russian factions of that country. Kuuva was of the latter faction and he was "murdered" "three weeks after the brief occupation of the city by the White Finnish Army fighting the Bolsheviks." I read this as a war-related death:

Toivo Timoteus Kuula (7 July 1883 – 18 May 1918) was a Finnish conductor and a composer. He was born in the Vehkakoski village of the Alavus town and registered as a native in the city of Vaasa (then Nikolainkaupunki), when Finland still was a Grand Duchy under Russian rule. He is known as a colorful and passionate portrayer of Finnish nature and people.

In 1909, Kuula became Jean Sibelius's first composition student. He is best remembered for his large output of melodic choir and vocal works. His instrumental works include two Ostrobothnian Suites for orchestra, a violin sonata, a piano trio, and an unfinished Symphony. Kuula's major choral work is often considered the cantata Stabat Mater, which was completed in spring 1915 (original version, later lost) but revised, beginning 1917 and unfinished at the time of his death. He also wrote a few dozen highly artistic piano works.

A Swedish critic once said that Kuula's music reaches parts of the human spirit where one is forced to deep examination of one's self.[citation needed]

Kuula was known to be a fierce Fennoman. He died in the provincial hospital in Viipuri in 1918 after being mortally wounded 18 days earlier on Walpurgis Night by a bullet fired by a Jäger. The bullet was fired as a result of a quarrel that happened at the Hotel Seurahuone in conjunction with the first victory celebration of the White victory in the Civil War of Finland. Kuula is buried in Hietaniemi cemetery, Helsinki.

wiki

[piston]

Rudi Stephan's only opera is based on Otto Borngraber's erotic version of the Bible's Abel and Cain. They're both in love with, or lusting for, Eve whose sexual desires are no longer being satisfied by a frigid older Adam.

STEPHAN: Die ersten Menschen.
Nancy Gustafson (Chawa, soprano), Franz Hawlata (Adahm, bass), Wolfgang Millgramm (Chabel, tenor), Donnie Ray Albert (Kajin, baritone), Orchestre National de France/Mikko Franck
Naïve V 5028 (F) (DDD) TT: 44:03 + 48:55

History, as they say, is written by the victors. When I think of the dead of World War I, I think of Britain and France -- the promising lives of George Butterworth and Wilfred Owen, among others. But, of course, Germans, Austrians, and Turks died too -- among them the twenty-eight-year-old Rudi Stephan, shot and killed at the front in 1915.

Stephan's music fits comfortably into the post-Wagnerian Austro-German milieu from roughly the turn of the century. Nevertheless, Stephan works the style better than most. His music moves with purpose, rather than flailing about in the Wagnerian high seas. In that way, he reminds me of Wagner himself, particularly something like Die Walküre. He doesn't work at Wagner's level, but then again, very few composers do. Nevertheless, he does have some of Wagner's musical drive.

Die erste Menschen, a "mystère érotique" by one Otto Borngräber, belongs to the late Nineteenth-Century genre of Biblical rewrites, like Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur, d'Annunzio's Le martyre de Saint Sébastien, and Wilde's Salomé. Time has treated these works badly. We tend to regard them as little more than kitschfests. Die erste Menschen (literally translated, "the first men"; better translated, "the first people." It's not easy to convey the sense of Menschen) retells the story of Cain and Abel, as you can discover by the clever variations on the Biblical names -- about as clever as "Schmitany Schmears." It tries to come up with a reason why Cain slew Abel. When I hit puberty, I wondered, if the Bible were literally true, where humanity came from, since Eve is the only woman around and she has only sons. That's right! Cain and Abel fight over who gets to sleep with mom. Racy stuff, eh? All bellowed with enough hot air to fly the Goodyear blimp. There's also some blather about how man invented or discovered God, which shows the same amount of religious and psychological acuity in the same over-inflated knock-off of Nietzsche.

Stephan has set all this twaddle to some very good music. Indeed, the only reason to endure the play is to listen to the music. Stephan supplies the depth of emotion and of psychology. He succeeds to such an extent that you probably won't laugh outright at Borngräber's ciphers while they cavort onstage, but wait until the music ends and read the libretto all on its lonesome. No one set piece stands out, but that's because Stephan constructs scenes rather than individual numbers. Each scene rushes inexorably to its climax.

As with most non-repertory operas, the CD records a live performance. Mikko Franck delivers a dynamic account. The orchestra responds to the shifts of mood alertly and together. Stephan demands a set of Wagnerian voices, and so we have Nancy Gustafson, a good Elisabeth, Franz Hawlata, a Wotan and Sachs in the making, and Donnie Ray Albert, a baritone who can shatter stone. The only disappointment is heldentenor Wolfgang Millgramm, who forces his voice sharp and into bleat, reminding me, oddly enough, of Jerry Lewis. Nevertheless, he doesn't sink the ship, and the love duet with Chawa rises almost to the heights of Siegmund and Sieglinde.

In all, Stephan lacks the genius of Strauss, but in his own way seems the equal of Korngold. Die erste Menschen remains a curiosity, but a curiosity well worth the occasional listen.


S.G.S. (February 2008)

[piston]

So why did Magnard confront the invading German forces in his neighborhood?

An old, completely fictional, narrative placed his family and his male domestics, such as the gardener, at the scene of this tragedy and explained his behavior by portraying the German soldiers as barbarians who immediately captured his son (his step-son, actually) and tied him to a tree. No need to elaborate further on that story; it's a complete invention of the mind. It is now clear to me that he had sent his family and staff away to a safe location while staying back to protect his own ground.

Was he completely mad?! In order to even begin to understand Magnard's combativeness, one must attempt to grasp the personality of a composer who had become pretty much isolated from the whole French artistic milieu, and that personality had been shaped by a traumatic childhood event, the suicide of his mother when he was four, by a father who apparently did not deal well with his adolescent son's rebelliousness, and by an introvert but nevertheless assertive young composer who alienated fellow composers and performing artists by his virulent attacks in the media, etc.

Magnard was always sensitive to any gossip that, were it not for his wealthy father, he had not the artistic merit to gain any public attention. Once his influential father --chief editor of the Figaro-- passed on, Magnard had very few reliable allies and he was essentially boycotted by all those who programmed and performed classical music in France. The guy, in short, lacked social skills and had very few trustworthy friends. He withdrew to his estate, married a single mother, Julie Creton, whose son had been fathered by a German man (surely also isolated from conventional society), built his own little family (Julie gave birth to two daughters), and although he had once been a military officer or reservist, he was now too old, going on fifty, to be offered a military commission at the beginning of the war which everybody assumed would be a short conflict.

He shot two German soldiers who were getting close to his property, killing one instantly and the other later died from his wound; the soldiers ran back to their leading officer who actually spoke to the village notary before any action was taken and declared Magnard to be a sniper, thus justifying an attack on his property. His stepson, who was not tied to a tree but on his way home to witness the event, later testified that, once the Germans set the property on fire, he heard a gun shot inside the house and that his step-father had said he would keep a bullet for himself, if needed. But Magnard's wife who had the difficult task of identifying her husband's burned body, stated that the body's position, how he had fallen by the window, indicated that he had been shot while the house was burning.

I am not sure that this biographical information adequately explains his behavior but, as an isolated and combative artist with prior military training, he refused to yield what had become his safe haven to the invaders.

[piston]

The only American classical musician fatality of the First World War I am aware of is a young violinist of solid reputation, a former student of Leopold Auer, in Petrograd, and of Czech violinist Otakar Sevcik, in Vienna. David Hochstein, from Rochester, NY, was 26 years old when he was killed in action on 15 October 1918, during the Meuse-Argonne offensive, as he led a small group of "runners" to the enemy lines. Several American violinists volunteered to serve in Europe shortly after the US declaration of war (Albert Spalding, Hochstein, Albert Stoessel, Ernest Schelling, etc.). Hochstein must have been appreciated for his knowledge of both French and German because, in contrast to other American violinists, he was still on the American front line during the final moments of the war.
Source: The Violinist, February 1919.

[slofstra]

Rudi Stephan's only opera is based on Otto Borngraber's erotic version of the Bible's Abel and Cain. They're both in love with, or lusting for, Eve whose sexual desires are no longer being satisfied by a frigid older Adam.

STEPHAN: Die ersten Menschen.
Nancy Gustafson (Chawa, soprano), Franz Hawlata (Adahm, bass), Wolfgang Millgramm (Chabel, tenor), Donnie Ray Albert (Kajin, baritone), Orchestre National de France/Mikko Franck
Naïve V 5028 (F) (DDD) TT: 44:03 + 48:55

History, as they say, is written by the victors. When I think of the dead of World War I, I think of Britain and France -- the promising lives of George Butterworth and Wilfred Owen, among others. But, of course, Germans, Austrians, and Turks died too -- among them the twenty-eight-year-old Rudi Stephan, shot and killed at the front in 1915.

Stephan's music fits comfortably into the post-Wagnerian Austro-German milieu from roughly the turn of the century. Nevertheless, Stephan works the style better than most. His music moves with purpose, rather than flailing about in the Wagnerian high seas. In that way, he reminds me of Wagner himself, particularly something like Die Walküre. He doesn't work at Wagner's level, but then again, very few composers do. Nevertheless, he does have some of Wagner's musical drive.

Die erste Menschen, a "mystère érotique" by one Otto Borngräber, belongs to the late Nineteenth-Century genre of Biblical rewrites, like Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur, d'Annunzio's Le martyre de Saint Sébastien, and Wilde's Salomé. Time has treated these works badly. We tend to regard them as little more than kitschfests. Die erste Menschen (literally translated, "the first men"; better translated, "the first people." It's not easy to convey the sense of Menschen) retells the story of Cain and Abel, as you can discover by the clever variations on the Biblical names -- about as clever as "Schmitany Schmears." It tries to come up with a reason why Cain slew Abel. When I hit puberty, I wondered, if the Bible were literally true, where humanity came from, since Eve is the only woman around and she has only sons. That's right! Cain and Abel fight over who gets to sleep with mom. Racy stuff, eh? All bellowed with enough hot air to fly the Goodyear blimp. There's also some blather about how man invented or discovered God, which shows the same amount of religious and psychological acuity in the same over-inflated knock-off of Nietzsche.

Stephan has set all this twaddle to some very good music. Indeed, the only reason to endure the play is to listen to the music. Stephan supplies the depth of emotion and of psychology. He succeeds to such an extent that you probably won't laugh outright at Borngräber's ciphers while they cavort onstage, but wait until the music ends and read the libretto all on its lonesome. No one set piece stands out, but that's because Stephan constructs scenes rather than individual numbers. Each scene rushes inexorably to its climax.

As with most non-repertory operas, the CD records a live performance. Mikko Franck delivers a dynamic account. The orchestra responds to the shifts of mood alertly and together. Stephan demands a set of Wagnerian voices, and so we have Nancy Gustafson, a good Elisabeth, Franz Hawlata, a Wotan and Sachs in the making, and Donnie Ray Albert, a baritone who can shatter stone. The only disappointment is heldentenor Wolfgang Millgramm, who forces his voice sharp and into bleat, reminding me, oddly enough, of Jerry Lewis. Nevertheless, he doesn't sink the ship, and the love duet with Chawa rises almost to the heights of Siegmund and Sieglinde.

In all, Stephan lacks the genius of Strauss, but in his own way seems the equal of Korngold. Die erste Menschen remains a curiosity, but a curiosity well worth the occasional listen.


S.G.S. (February 2008)

No better way to find no audience at all than with an erotic retelling of a Bible story, at least in this day and age. The religious types consider it sacriligeous and the non-religious types aren't familiar with, or don't understand the metaphorical significance of the background story. There are exceptions such as Strauss's Salome, but arguably Strauss told it as it was.

Another example from the literary world in the decades between the wars is Thomas Mann's magnum opus 'Joseph and his Brothers' of which I read a few hundred pages before it went into storage. I'm probably in that very narrow market slice that is both a Christian, although of the universalist kind, and interested in highbrow literature.

[John F]

No better way to find no audience at all than with an erotic retelling of a Bible story

Oh, I don't know, Richard Strauss's "Salome" does pretty well at the box office.

[slofstra]

No better way to find no audience at all than with an erotic retelling of a Bible story

Oh, I don't know, Richard Strauss's "Salome" does pretty well at the box office.

Okay, now re-read my post. No, I didn't change it.

[John F]

Right you are. But Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss did not "tell it like it was." The Bible story is just a couple of sentences, and most of the libretto is a decadent post-Romantic creation.

[piston]

Abel offered meat and grease; Cain offered veggies and fruits. "God" preferred Abel's gift and Cain, so very jealous, killed his brother. That's about all we know. Perhaps, Eve also liked Abel's "meat and grease."

There's a different version in the Quran, not as good vs. evil as in the Bible. And there's a ton of cultural stories with the same theme, including the intriguing Iroquois story of "the First Mother" taking the side of the Man of Flint, who made everything so difficult and thus appeared evil from a Christian perspective, over the Man of Fire, who made everything easy for humanity and thus is cast in a "good" light in Christian worldview. Of course, the "good" Iroquois twin kills his brother, the "evil" one, by lying and deceiving, which the Man of Flint cannot be accused of in the story.

And to add to this biblical theme of hunter-gatherer versus horticulturalists, in the Native American prehistorical record of who invested time and energy in building well fortified "castles" in preparation for war, with plenty of finds about war-related burial sites, the horticulturalists are the aggressive party, not the hunter-gatherers, to the extent of genocidal wars, according to Iroquois oral traditions about the origins of their League of Peace.

[slofstra]

Right you are. But Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss did not "tell it like it was." The Bible story is just a couple of sentences, and most of the libretto is a decadent post-Romantic creation.

I studied Wilde's original libretto, at least the English version, in English lit. It gives one a very discombobulated feeling because of the stilted sentences and repetitive nature of the prose. Try reading a bit of it.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42704/42 ... 2704-h.htm

And while the Bible has no "dance of the seven veils", Salome does dance; there's no liberty with the scope of the events that I can tell. Whereas Abel and Cains' Oedipal complex is expanding the envelope quite a lot.
I'm not sure why it is actually, but the idea of the beheading of John the Baptist as the basis for an opera works; the Abel/ Cain thing not so much.

[John F]

I know Wilde's play and the libretto of "Salome" very well, thank you. They coincide with the Bible story in respect to the dance and the execution of John the Baptist, but that's only the last part of the opera. Salome's erotic fixation on Jochana'an, indeed Salome's name, and much else are not in the Bible, and not everything in the Bible is in the opera, for example that the unnamed girl's mother instructs her to demand John's head, she obeys, and she gives the severed head to her mother. That is quite different from the lurid motives of Wilde's characters, especially Salome herself, which are his invention. It's largely fiction.

For those who are interested, the Biblical accounts are in Matthew 14:6-11 and Mark 6:21-29.

[lennygoran]

And to add to this biblical theme of hunter-gatherer versus horticulturalists,

I walk the fence on this issue-love horticulturalists but also love meat--it's the bible and its miracles that pose a problem for me. Regards, Len

[Ted Quanrud]

The English composer and poet Ivor Gurney can be considered a casualty of the Great War. Here is the edited and much reduced Wikipedia entry.

Born in 1890, Gurney showed musical ability early and was a chorister at Gloucester Cathedral from 1900 to 1906, where he met fellow composer Herbert Howells who became a lifelong friend. Gurney began composing music at the age of 14, and won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in 1911 where he studied under Sir Charles Villiers Stanford who said Gurney was potentially "the biggest of them all", but he was "unteachable." Gurney was troubled by mood swings,suffering his first breakdown in 1913. After a rest, he seemed to recover and returned to college. He enlisted as a private soldier in the Gloucestershire Regiment in 1915. At the front, he was writing the poems for what would become his first book "Severn and Somme" when he was wounded in the shoulder in 1917. He recovered and returned to battle. Gurney was gassed in September the same year and was hospitalized. There remains some controversy about the possible effects of the gas on his mental health, even though Gurney had shown some signs and symptoms of a bipolar disorder since his teens. "Being gassed mildly with the new gas is no worse than catarrh or a bad cold”, Gurney wrote. In March 1918, Gurney suffered a serious breakdown, and in June he threatened suicide. He slowly regained some of his emotional stability and in October was honourably discharged from the army, receiving an unconventional diagnosis of nervous breakdown from "deferred" shell shock.

Although Gurney seemed to thrive after the war, when he was regarded as one of the most promising men of his generation, his mental distress continued to worsen He studied for a brief time with Ralph Vaughan Williams upon returning to the Royal College of Music but withdrew from the college before completing his studies. He continued to compose, producing a large number of songs, instrumental pieces, chamber music and two works for orchestra, War Elegy (1920) and A Gloucestershire Rhapsody (1919–1921). His music was being performed and published. However by 1922, his condition had deteriorated to the point where his family had him declared insane.

He spent the last 15 years of his life in psychiatric hospitals, where he was diagnosed as suffering from "delusional insanity." Gurney wrote prolifically during the asylum years, producing eight collections of verse. His output included two plays in Shakespearean style - "Gloucester Play (1926) and "The Tewksbury Trial" (1926). During this time he appeared to believe that he was Shakespeare. He also continued to compose music, but to a far lesser degree. An examination of his archive suggests that up to two thirds of his musical output remains unpublished and unrecorded.

Gurney died of tuberculosis while still a patient at the City of London Mental Hospital on 26 December 1937, aged 47.

On 11 November 1985, Gurney was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. The inscription on the stone was written by a fellow Great War poet, Wilfred Owen. It reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity." A memorial to Gurney was erected in 2009 near Ypres, close to the spot where he was the victim of a mustard gas attack in 1917.

[piston]

Very true, but he's not alone. Defining a "casualty" is still an arbitrary exercise. Is Durosoir also a casualty because he composed quite a lot but never sought to attract artistic attention upon himself?

Fatality is a hard fact; casualty is an interpretive one. Look at Moeran as another very serious casualty case.

It's been hard to find anything, whatsoever, on classical music composers/musicians from Russia who went through a much longer ordeal than World War I; I haven't come up with a single fatality case yet. And this record of Austro-German fatalities on the eastern front is, I'm sure, terribly deficient. Do you realize that there were over four hundred internment camps in Russia during this war?! They varied in population from five hundred people, in the west of that country, to 35,000 people in Siberia.

The problem as we look eastward is that war records were not kept as well as in the west, particularly in the midst of a revolution...

The only methodological approach that could shed some better light on what happened on the eastern front is if we had a full record of music students and notable graduates at music conservatories, which we don't have.

[Heck148]

The only American classical musician fatality of the First World War I am aware of is a young violinist of solid reputation, a former student of Leopold Auer, in Petrograd, and of Czech violinist Otakar Sevcik, in Vienna. David Hochstein, from Rochester, NY, was 26 years old when he was killed in action on 15 October 1918, during the Meuse-Argonne offensive,

Interesting...There is still a Hochstein School of Music in Rochester - a community Music school which has had a long successful history. I taught there for several years while I lived in Rochester. good place...quite a history.
http://hochstein.org/

[piston]

The Violinist also refers to Hochstein's desire to create a "breathing space" in the crowded section of Rochester where he grew up. If his art ever "brought him riches," he reportedly stated, he would make this urban improvement project one of his top priorities, "a park and a playground where young and old alike "could enjoy free air, rest, and recreation." A movement to achieve this dream came together in early 1919 but something must have happened because in lieu of a park, "named in honor of Lieutenant Hochstein" to "serve as a lasting memorial to this wonderful youth and wonderful character," the Hochstein "music school settlement" was founded, a different kind of "fresh air"!