To the beat of the drum

WFor all their association with military matters, marches were often adopted for an entirely different purpose by composers of the last two centuries, says Tom Service hat’s happened to marches? Military, funeral, wedding, or revolutionary: composers just aren’t writing them like they used to. Is it because their overtones of pomp and circumstance no longer chime with our times? In the post-imperial world of the West, it’s not only the civilisations who did the marching-as-to-war we remember, but those who were the victims of those conquests.

Yet the marches written for the concert hall – not as soundtracks for military subjugation – reveal a different story. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, composers were satirising and deepening the meaning of marches, so that the obstinate two-time, leftright sounds of drill-halls turned into something much richer and stranger.

That’s true even for the Pomp and Circumstance Military Marches – to give them their full title – that Edward Elgar composed from 1901 onwards. The first batch were written to shore up popular support for the British army, humbled by the Boer wars, and while their tunes have inspired any number of dreams about a ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, Elgar’s characteristic emotional complexity is there throughout, shading and undermining their supposed militarism with orchestral half-lights and nostalgia.

Elgar’s marches build on a tradition that subverts the genre: Berlioz marches his hero to the scaffold in the drugaddled oblivion of his Symphonie fantastique, while Beethoven’s symphonic marches amplify their emotional and structural scale, from the

Elgar’s distinctive emotional complexity undermines the militarism of his marches

funereal tread of the slow movement of his ‘Eroica’ Symphony to the finale of his Fifth Symphony, a C major utopia that takes the rhetoric of tunes like La Marseillaise into the stratosphere.

But my favourite 19th-century example of a symphonic march that explodes the meaning of the military march is the third movement of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Pathétique’ Symphony. What’s so weird about this breathless, skirling march is that its relentless energy goes nowhere. There is no goal of victory, only a sense of going round and round in ever more dizzying circles.

At the end of the movement, Tchaikovsky creates an orchestral eruption that’s more exciting than the climax of most symphonies. I’m never surprised that audiences often think this is the end of the whole piece, but Tchaikovsky is playing a game with the sound and psychology of the march, and with all of us in his audience. After this march to nowhere, there’s the final Adagio movement of the ‘Pathétique’, a lament that reveals the march was a futile exercise in marching on the spot, a mask of militarism – exactly the kind of militarisation that the Russian Empire and all other empires were building up in 1893 – which is empty at its core.

And it’s in their subversion of musical, military and political power that marches still matter: as La Marseillaise says, ‘Marchons, marchons!’