The Choral

Yesterday’s Music of the Week, the powerful antiwar song “Not in Our Name,” comes from fathers and sons in southern Germany, who are joining their fellow Europeans in rejecting EU policymakers’ positioning of military conscription as an “increasingly relevant” component of national defense.

In the historical drama The Choral, set in 1916 Yorkshire in the middle of the First World War, the mere fact of having conducted in Germany is a black mark against the man (played by Ralph Fiennes) who becomes the small town’s choral director, but his artistry and love of music eventually win over the townspeople and the motley crew he recruits to perform Edward Elgar’s choral masterpiece, The Dream of Gerontius. The movie’s central message is that the arts and music are necessities of life—and just as much for the common man as for the elites who serve as patrons. In the face of adversity, what we need most is each other and our community. The arts and music gather us together and remind us of what we love, what we share, and what must and should not be.

WWI killed 6% of Britain’s adult male population (12.5% of those serving). Thus, while The Choral is not an antiwar film per se, it is set against the backdrop of a horrific war that included some of the bloodiest battles in human history—which means that when one young character clear-sightedly remarks that he and his peers are both “fodder for the mill and fodder for the front,” it hits home. As one of the movie’s characters could equally well have stated, “All wars are bankers’ wars.”