Casualties of War

[Albion]

Many composers are known to have perished as a result of the hostilities during World War One, perhaps the most prominent being Magnard and Granados. Some British composers of great promise whose lives were cut short by the same conflict were Ernest Farrar, George Butterworth and Cecil Coles. Luckily some of the music by these three has made it onto disc.

Other than Webern (who was shot by mistake) and Viktor Ullmann (who died in Auschwitz), I can't immediately recollect a similar roll-call from World War Two, but there must have been other composers (especially amongst the unsungs) who were direct casualties of the 1939-45 conflict. Any examples? 

[alberto]

Erwin Schuloff, Gideon Klein, Pavel Haas, Hans Krasa all died in Nazi lagers, after having shared the experience of the Therezin "model" lager.
Decca (when had still a, so to say, cultural policy) dedicated to them a few CDs of the series "Degenerate Music".
There aro also at least Supraphon, Berlin Classics, Arte Nova recordings.
In World War I shoul be remembered the young died German Rudi Stephan (recorded by Chandos, the disappeared Koch and the esoteric label Archiphon).

[jimmattt]

Veniamin Fleischman (Rothschild's Violin, finished by Shostakovitch); Jehan Alain, killed a dozen Germans before they killed him, he had some of his music with him when he died; Dick Kattenberg, Dutch composer who was killed in the camps along with Leo Smit, every time I have read about Kattenberg, there are superlatives about what music he left, hopefully some will be played. And Hugo Distler committed suicide as a result of being conscripted into the German army, though that's not a battle casualty, if you have heard any of his music you know more and even better would have come from him, fragile soul that he was.

[M. Henriksen]

I believe Marcel Tyberg died in Auschwitz.


Morten

[jimmattt]

And peripheral to the Vietnam war, Philippa Schuyler drowned there in 1967 when a helicopter she was in crashed into the sea. She was a child prodigy pianist and composer and then was a war correspondent, which is why she was in Vietnam and her death was in the course of her assisting with the evacuation of school children in 1967. She composed piano music, Manhattan Nocturne, Sleepy Hollow sketches, Rhapsody of Youth and Nile Fantasy for orchestra. Her parents tried to "engineer" her genius with all kinds of diets and regimens. Sounds like she lived a pretty "irregular" life but traveled extensively and wrote 5 books about her travels. I wonder if I will ever hear any of her work.

[Albion]

There are some intriguing names here - I'd never come across Philippa Schuyler before, but there seems to be a fascinating biography published by OUP USA telling the story of her all-too-brief life -



OUP USA: "The turbulent life story of a child prodigy who inspired a generation of African-Americans

George Schuyler, a renowned and controversial black journalist of the Harlem Renaissance, and Josephine Cogdell, a blond, blue-eyed Texas heiress and granddaughter of slave owners, believed that intermarriage would "invigorate" the races, thereby producing extraordinary offspring. Their daughter, Philippa Duke Schuyler, became the embodiment of this theory, and they hoped she would prove that interracial children represented the final solution to America's race problems.
Able to read and write at the age of two and a half, a pianist at four, and a composer by five, Philippa was often compared to Mozart. During the 1930s and 40s she graced the pages of Time and Look magazines, the New York Herald Tribune, and The New Yorker. Philippa grew up under the adoring and inquisitive eyes of an entire nation and soon became the role model and inspiration for a generation of African-American children. But as an adult she mysteriously dropped out of sight, leaving America to wonder what had happened to the "little Harlem genius." Suffering the double sting of racism and gender bias, Philippa had been rejected by the elite classical music milieu in the United States and forced to find an audience abroad, where she flourished as a world-class performer and composer. She traveled throughout South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia performing for kings, queens, and presidents. By then Philippa had added a second career as an author and foreign correspondent reporting on events around the globe--from Albert Schweitzer's leper colony in Lamberéné to the turbulent Asian theater of the 1960s. She would give a command performance for Queen Elisabeth of Belgium one day, and hide from the Viet Cong among the ancient graves of the Annam kings another.
But behind the scrim of adventure, glamour, and intrigue was an American outcast, a woman constantly searching for home and self. "I am a beauty--but I'm half colored...so I'm always destined to be an outsider," she wrote in her diary. Philippa tried to define herself through love affairs, but found only disappointment and scandal. In a last attempt to reclaim an identity, she began to "pass" as Caucasian. Adopting an Iberian-American heritage, she reinvented herself as Felipa Monterro, an ultra-right conservative who wrote and lectured for the John Birch Society. Her experiment failed, as had her parents' dream of smashing America's racial barriers. But at the age of thirty five, Philippa finally began to embark on a racial catharsis: She was just beginning to find herself when on May 9, 1967, while on an unauthorized mission of mercy, her life was cut short in a helicopter crash over the waters of war-torn Vietnam.
The first authorized biography of Philippa Schuyler, Composition in Black and White draws on previously unpublished letters and diaries to reveal an extraordinary and complex personality. Extensive research and personal interviews from around the world make this book not only the definitive chronicle of Schuyler's restless and haunting life, but also a vivid history of the tumultuous times she lived through, from the Great Depression, through the Civil Rights movement, to the Vietnam war. Talalay has created a highly perceptive and provocative portrait of a fascinating woman."

Apparently, the helicopter was deliberately put into free-fall by the pilot to give his civilian passengers a thrill, but they all got rather more than they bargained for when he completely lost control and crashed into the sea. Schuyler survived the crash but was unable to swim and drowned.

There don't appear to be any recordings of her music, but her papers are at Syracuse University (http://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/s/schuyler_p.htm) - the collection includes full scores of Manhattan Nocturne (1945), Nile Fantasia (1946) and Rumpelstiltsken (c.1947).

[Delicious Manager]

There is quite a role-call of composers (mostly Jewish, unsurprisingly) who were murdered by the Nazis during WWII - mostly perishing in concentration camps:

Pavel Haas (killed in a gas chamber in Auschwitz, 17 October 1944 (the same day as Krasa and the day before Ullmann))
Gideon Klein (actively killed in Fürstengrube camp, January 1945)
Franz Krasa (killed in a gas chamber in Auschwitz, 17 October 1944 (the same day as Haas and the day before Ullmann))
Ervín Schulhoff (died of tuberculosis in Wülzburg concentration camp, 18 August 1942)
Viktor Ullmann (killed in a gas chamber in Auschwitz, 18 October 1944 (the day after Haas))

One other:

Jehan Alain (killed resisting Nazi occupation of his home town of Le Petit-Puy, 20 June 1940)

[Albion]

Further back in time, British composer Clement Harris (1871-1897) was killed at Pente Pigadia on 23 April 1897 fighting for the Greeks against the Turks. He was a pupil of Clara Schumann and great friend of Siegfried Wagner, whose Symphonic Poem Glück (1922-3) is dedicated to his memory.

Harris's most substantial work, the Symphonic Poem Paradise Lost (1895) and the Festival March were recorded by Marco Polo in 1994 - http://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.223660.

The full score of Paradise Lost is available at IMSLP - http://imslp.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost_%28Harris,_Clement%29

[Albion]

Walter Leigh was killed in action near Tobruk in 1942, dying before he achieved his potential or indeed produced any really substantial scores, although he left an unfinished sketch for a symphony. I've just been listening again to the splendid Lyrita disc (a good conspectus of his music) which includes the charming Harpsichord Concertino -



If you like the neo-classical works of Holst from the 1920s, or respond to the spicy-archaicism of Warlock's Capriol Suite and Moeran's Serenade this disc could be well worth a listen.

[alberto]

Leone Sinigaglia (1868-1944) suffered a mortal hearth attack when Nazi police came to arrest him in the hospital where he was a patient.

[Francis Pott]

William Lawes stopped one fighting for the royal cause at the siege of Chester in 1645.

[thalbergmad]

Excellent snippet of info Francis. For the life of me I did not expect the English Civil War to get into this thread.

Being a nosy git, I have had a browse through your website. I think I will have to buy your "Farewell to Hirta", being a bit of a St Kilda buff and having visited. Sounds lovely and I don't think I have ever heard any compositions relating to these Islands.

Regards

Thal

[chill319]

The wonderful Armenian folklorist and composer, Gomitas Vartabed, is a different kind of casualty of war. As described on www.armenianheritage.com:

After the April 24, 1915 massacres of the Armenian people by the Turks, he succumbed to mental and physical anguish and never fully recovered.  Komitas lived as if a walking corpse for the next twenty years. The revered holy man died in Paris on October 22, 1935 in a mental hospital.

[britishcomposer]

Edmund von Borck (1906-44) was really a great loss. I know his magnificent Saxophone Concerto op.6, written in 1932 for Sigurd Rascher, actually the first one!
There are more orchestral works and two operas. He hasn't even a wikipedia entry!
BTW, fyrexia uploaded the PC op.20.

[eschiss1]

apparently Joseph Holbrooke wrote one in or before the 1920s which was performed then, so hardly the first saxophone concerto. and he (Borck) has a Russian Wikipedia entry- translate it into English and German and one has a start in those Wikipedias too. Russian WP