BY ANDREW MESSENGER
Let’s be honest, the mid-1910s were a pretty terrible time to be Australian. You can see it just in the numbers: between 1914 and 1919, over 333,000 Australians enlisted to fight in a huge worldwide war, sailing thousands of miles around the world to fight Germans, Austrians and Turks. Some 61,000 of them were never to return; another 155,000 were injured, many of them twice or three times – and all this from a country of five million people. No other nation lost so high a proportion of its fighting men from their principle front line formation – 65 per cent.
The war left deep scars on Australia. It was said in the ‘20s that a particularly mean-spirited person could cause a public stampede just by yelling, “gas!” The artistic community was no less influenced – some might say devastated – by the fighting. Some Australian composers were inspired by the fighting, others driven away. Some were even killed.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Great War, and here is a little history of the way three Australian musicians experienced the worst of any of our conflicts.
Frederick Septimus Kelly
Frederick Kelly is not one of our better known composers, which is a real shame. He was a talented and emotionally sophisticated composer – his most famous Elegy for Strings sounds a bit like early Benjamin Britten or Ralph Vaughn Williams. As a composer, he was untrendy, romantic and tonal. But perhaps the chief reason he has been forgotten is that he was killed charging a machine gun in the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
Kelly spent his early years in Australia and was educated at Sydney Grammar School, but like many Australians of the era travelled to England to further his education. After studying history at Oxford (and winning a gold medal for rowing in the 1908 Olympics), he began to concentrate on his solo musical career, becoming a well-recognised concert and chamber music pianist. He barely had time to compose – in fact, Kelly would have been entirely forgotten if it were not for the work of John Carmody and Therese Radic, nearly 70 years later. It was only in 2011 that his ‘lost’ Violin Sonata in G, titled Gallipoliafter the place it was written, was premiered in edited form.
When the First World War began, Kelly put his normal life on hold like the rest of Europe and joined up. Commissioned into the Royal Naval Division with several of his closest chums from Oxford, he found himself once again deployed to yet another totally alien landscape – Turkey. It’s always a bad idea to go to war with close friends. When his closest of companions, the poet Rupert Brooke, died of disease, Frederick was absolutely devastated. He sought solace in music. He is reported to have started writing hisElegy for Strings, written in honour of Brooke, with the poet slowly fading beside him. It is by far his most powerful work.
Like tens of thousands of others, Kelly had survived the lost fight against the Turks only to be shipped over to Europe to fight the Germans in the meat-grinder of the Somme. Kelly had already been wounded twice, awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, reached the lofty rank of Lieutenant-Commander and earned the respect of the men he commanded when, on November 13 1916, he tried to rush a machine gun position and was shot and killed. He was 35.
Percy Grainger
Easily the strangest Australian composers ever to live, Grainger was very nearly ruined by the war. By 1914, he was a well-established concert pianist with a modest compositional career, firmly ensconced in the London artistic community. Then, a month after the start of the First World War, he left.
Grainger’s public justification for his flight was fairly weak: he claimed he just wanted to “give mother a change.” Many in belligerent Britain saw through this excuse and Grainger was widely considered a coward, but not without justice. John Bird, Grainger’s biographer, quoted him arguing that being killed fighting would have prevented him becoming Australia’s first composer of worth.
The neutral United States of America was good to Grainger. To his credit, he took his new American home seriously and quickly applied for US citizenship. He spent the next two years travelling across the continent through concert tours, record deals, and even a private performance with President Woodrow Wilson. Even when the US finally joined the war in 1917, nothing could stop Grainger – even joining the army simply furthered his career. As a US Army Bandsman in the Coastal Artillery, he was not posted overseas (once again, neatly avoiding the active service he would have seen if he’d forgone voluntary enlistment and been drafted into the US Army). It was during this period that he wrote his hit arrangement of the old tune Country Gardens that would cement his fame forevermore.
Arthur Benjamin
Unlike Grainger, London-based Benjamin was not one to avoid doing his part. On the outbreak of the war, Benjamin immediately joined up. Commissioned into the (British) Royal Fusiliers Regiment, he fought as an infantryman for over two years. But in 1917, he decided he wanted a change and transferred into the RAF.
In July of 1918, a relatively mild case of bad luck struck, when Benjamin’s aircraft was shot down by Herman Goering’s Jasta 11. He was taken prisoner and taken to Ruhleben Camp, where he spent the rest of the war. By hilarious coincidence, the camp was already full of musicians, many of them Australian – Ernest MacMillan, Edward Clark, Charles Adler, Benjamin Dale and Edgar Bainton were just a few. Bainton, later the director of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, took advantage of the end of the war and became the first English citizen to conduct the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. The camp had long had a near-professional musical society – one of the highlights was a 1915 performance of Mikado with costumes and orchestra.
In 1918, Benjamin returned home to Australia for the first time in years, settling down to become one of our most prestigious pianists.
Image: Brisbane’s 1916 ANZAC Day Procession. Wikimedia Commons.
