Pictured are the massive war tubas of the 87th Acoustic Brigade, Moldavian 1st Army, before the unsuccessful attack on the city of Müd during the Third Balkan War, 1908. It is said that these gigantic instruments played fortissimo could knock a flight of geese from the sky at 15 kilometers. The piece de guerre of the day was reported to be Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in F minor, transcribed for war tuba and barrage trombone by the young Wilhelm Furtwängler, who, as a noted conductor later in the century, went on to more significant victories in Europe’s concert halls.
The intent of such powerful W.M.D.s (Weapons of Musical Destruction) was, naturally, to render enemy soldiers tone-deaf mindless zombies, unable to hear orders and fit only for filling empty symphony halls during new music concerts. Where the original notion of war music came from is unknown. Possibly the first use came in the early 18th century with the composition of the war tune that came to be known as Pachelbel’s “Cannon”, which, as all students of war music know, kills by ennui rather than aural violence.
It is known that Major-General Musislav Smertch was inspired to experiment with war music by a particularly invigorating performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture in Moscow which, typical for late Czarist Russia, featured live fire during the cannon obligato in the final section, causing major structural damage to the south wall of the Imperial Opera House. Fortunately, casualties were limited to a handful of cheap boxes and ground floor seating. The performance struck a discordant note in the general’s otherwise finely-tuned mind and shortly afterward he was experimenting with bassoon attack squads and regiments armed only with clarinets and flugelhorns. Success was elusive, even though the basic idea was sound.
History was made during the siege of Dröss in the Carpathian Insurrection, when General Michigjan Svedja led a company of 76 barrage trombones against a unit of Hungarian Todesviolines, the first time war instruments fought against each other, later immortalized (albeit in obscure fashion) in the stirring tune by Meredith Wilson. Svedja later won an important victory over the famed Galician Oboe Battalion near Günk, in north-central Lïnt.
Having demonstrated the battlefield supremacy of labrosones over strings and woodwinds, Svedja went on to construct his renowned war tubas, which, when played molto vivace under the right atmospheric conditions, could knock stone buildings off their foundations and shatter all the glassware in an opposing army’s officers’ mess.
As the use of war tubas spread, draft boards scoured the orchestras of central Europe to find instrumentalists with sufficient embouchure. Composers like Shoenberg, Webern, Berg, Bartôk, and Scriabin were commissioned to write pieces. Even Stravinsky volunteered his services to the newly-formed French Brigade de Euphonium Militaire.
Alas, the career of the war tuba was short. It was found that with the wrong wind direction, the sound carried back to friendly forces, making them unable to fight past intermission. Despite the issuance of earplugs, Alban Berg’s War Tuba Sonata (Op. 2) rendered both sides hors de combat before the end of the first movement. The war tuba saw little action in World War I. Indeed, war music in general fell out of use after the Americans showed up “over there.” Having listened to so much Jazz and Broadway show tunes, the Yanks were, of course, already tone-deaf and largely immune to war music’s effects. The last recorded use of a war tuba was the deployment of the German army’s giant “Paris Tuba”, otherwise known as “Tubbi”, a 12-meter-belled behemoth so enormous that it had to be transported by railway carriage. On a clear day, the “Tubbi” tuba barrage could be heard all the way to Bolougne. It was specially tuned to loosen all the bolts in the Eiffel Tower from a range of 70 miles. Unfortunately for the Germans, all the bolts in the famous tower had long since rusted tight.
Even though they are over a century gone, the modern world should never question the lethal power of Smertch and Svedja’s war instruments. At least one instrument was considered so heinous in its effect that its use was specifically barred by the Geneva Convention. As a result, to this day, no saxophone is ever seen or heard in the world’s symphony orchestras.
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