The Rest Is Noise Series: Zero Hour: The U.S. Army and German Music, 1945–1949

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Alex Ross. The Rest Is Noise Series: Zero Hour: The U.S. Army and German Music, 1945–1949

ZERO HOUR. The U.S. Army and German Music, 1945–1949. From The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross

Contents

10. ZERO HOUR. The U.S. Army and German Music, 1945–1949

NOTES. Abbreviations Used

Zero Hour

SUGGESTED LISTENING AND READING. Five Recommended Recordings

Zero Hour

Read the full book. The Rest is Noise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Отрывок из книги

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of 20th century classical music, The Rest is Noise.

It is released as a special stand-alone ebook to celebrate a year-long festival at the Southbank Centre, inspired by the book. The festival consists of a series of themed concerts. Read this chapter if you’re attending concerts in the episode

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On August 19, Britten finished his cycle by setting Donne’s sonnet “Death be not proud.” The singer declaims the words “And death shall be no more” on a rising scale; fixates for nine long beats on the word “Death”; and finally, over a clanging dominant-tonic cadence, thunders, “Thou shalt die.”

In 1945 Germany was a primitive society such as Europe had not known since the Middle Ages. The former citizens of Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich were living a hand-to-mouth existence, scavenging for food, drinking from drainpipes, cooking over wood fires, living in the basements of destroyed houses or in hand-built trailers and cabins. In 1948 the glamorous young American musician Leonard Bernstein arrived in Munich to conduct a concert and reported back home: “The people starve, struggle, rob, beg for bread. Wages are often paid in cigarettes. Tipping is all in cigarettes. It is all misery.”

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