Music, War and Revolution

The first part of the three-part documentary focuses on the enthusiasm for the war in the musical world: when musicians and composers became fervent patriots and soldiers. How did the composers and musicians handle these times of war? How did their experiences at the battlefront affect their composing? What do the compositions reveal of this era and its spirit, beliefs and artistic changes of this age?

This documentary is dedicated to Russian composers of the late teens and early ’20s of the last century. The former “young wild ones,” composers such as Arthur Lourié, Nikolai Roslawets, Alexander Mosolov as well as Vladimir Deshevov and Lev Termen remain to this day relatively and unjustly unknown and their lives have remained largely unexplored. However, this generation injected life into the musical world of that time, greatly leaving their mark. The young composers were adventuresome; they flirted with futurism, wrote the first twelve-tone chord of musical history, invented the first electronic musical instrument and created sounds previously unheard.

The great seminal catastrophe of 1914 was not merely a historical upheaval for politics and society. Music had also lost its political innocence. But can music be political? Already in the 19th century, an increasing number of composers and musicians had started to adopt political agendas, and to this day many musicians position themselves politically. “Power and Music”, the series’ 3rd part embarks on a search for the political aspects of music, combining historical examples with the present. The film itself thus deals with various standpoints of music’s political moments and starts a dialogue with renowned artists such as conductor Valery Gergiev, Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero or the German-British cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, one of the last survivors of the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz.