Class is erased as musicians of all genres unite on the Ukraine front
NewsEd Vulliamy has written a fabulous piece for Granta on the way classical and rock musicians have forgotten their differences to fight the Russian invaders. If you read nothing else today, make it this frontline piece.
Here’s a sample:
… During the day, through the doors of the nearby former Jesuit – now Greco-Catholic – church wherein military funerals are held, coffins were carried in by their comrades, for benediction, then back down the steps, accompanied by a dirge from a military band and followed by young widows and scores of other mourners in tears. The same had happened the day before, and would happen the day after. Now, Verdi’s unforgiving Dies Irae erupts, a swirl of acceleration and deceleration; mezzo-soprano Anastasiia Polishchuk’s delivery pierces the air, and with it her audience’s collective heart….
Two evenings later, a different but no less impactful event: a new opera by Ukraine’s prominent Ukrainian composer Yevhen Stankovych, The Terrible Revenge, based on the gothic horror story by Nikolai Gogol, born in Poltava – then part of the Russian empire, afterwards the USSR, now Ukraine. Significantly, the libretto, by Stankovych, is a resetting for the stage in Ukrainian of Gogol’s original Russian prose. …
When reading these reports of killed musicians, many of a high professional order, we might remember the terrible effects wars have on populations. In World War I, there were 1,310,000 Frenchmen killed or missing which represented 10.5% of the male population of working age, slightly higher than the figure for Germany (9.8%.) Britain’s losses were also major (5.1%). To the figure for French losses should be added 1,100,000 severely wounded and a similar number for Germany.
In WWII, Germany lost 5.3 million men, and the USSR 27 million from all walks of life.
Losses like these have enormous demographic, economic, social and political impacts and can leave the intellectual, academic, and cultural worlds of countries harmed for long periods. This war will leave Ukraine and Russia weakened for a couple generations to come. Due to its smaller population, this is especially true for Ukraine.
As is well-known, weakening Russia was exactly one of the planned goals of the war years before it began:
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/25/politics/biden-administration-russia-strategy/index.html
Now the planners are admitting that this has become far more costly for the US than was anticipated. We are being weakened too:
https://newrepublic.com/article/170088/cost-ukraine-war-weakening-russia
This war and its terrible effects were entirely avoidable.
George Marshall, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army under Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, who then served as Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense under Truman, and the author of the Marshall Plan, always held that the best way to win a war was to prevent it from happening. If we had leaders like we did during that era, we would not be having this war.
And of course, Russia has suffered equally disastrous leadership problems as well.