On the 80th anniversary of D-Day, my thoughts turn to American composer George Rochberg, who could write symphonies with the best of them, but was also a man of principle, who had real guts.

Rochberg, born in Paterson, NJ, in 1918, was for decades a fixture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he chaired the music department until 1968. He continued to teach there until 1983.

But his big claim to fame – or, in some circles, notoriety – is that he was one of the first composers of his kind to emerge from the strictures of serialism, predominant in academic circles from mid-century, to embrace a new tonality. The shift was brought on, it is said, by the untimely loss of his son, Paul, to a brain tumor in 1964.

Rochberg felt the musical vocabulary he had been employing inadequate to express his grief and rage. Beginning with his String Quartet No. 3 in 1971, he began to incorporate tonal passages back into his music, much to the dismay of his academic peers. His String Quartet No. 6 of 1978 includes a set of variations on Pachelbel’s “Canon.” Horrors!

Little did anyone realize at the time that this was the most avant-garde thing Rochberg could have done. He was the unwitting prophet of a new pluralism that went on to become the norm.

What is perhaps not so well known is that Rochberg’s mettle had been tested well before the petty skirmishes of Ivory Tower politics, when he was thrown into the deep-end of one of the pivotal operations of World War II.

Rochberg was drafted into the U.S. Army infantry in 1942. A lot of musicians fulfilled their military service by composing marches or playing in military bands. Many were never even shipped overseas. While Rochberg did have his share of musical assignments, he saw real action as part of George S. Patton’s Third Army during its perilous breakout from Normandy following D-Day in 1944.

Amy Lynn Wlodarski writes about it in her book, “George Rochberg, American Composer: Personal Trauma and Artistic Creativity” (University of Rochester Press, 2019):

“Nearly fifty years later, he could still vividly recall the ‘look of fear’ on the faces of the soldiers who had been wounded in the initial onslaught: ‘Walking away from the plane that had just landed on an airstrip on Omaha Beach… and seeing the wounded, walking and on stretchers, going to the same plane that had just taken us from England. The look in their eyes, a look I’d never seen before that day. Almost an animal look; glistening fear, anxiety, uncertainty radiating from their eyes.’ Upon arrival, his division was immediately dispatched to help with the second stage of the invasion, which involved breaking through the hedgerows in northern France, a deafening assault that required explosive charges to dislodge the thick, thorny bushes of the French countryside. The fatigue from constant marching and physical work was overwhelming despite nearly a full year of basic training: ‘I remember being dog-tired [at] night. Apparently I [once] slept through some minor bombing by German reconnaissance planes.’”

Mangled feet were par for the course, but Rochberg himself wound up taking a bullet, the first of several substantial injuries he would receive in combat. His doctors remarked that if it had been the First World War, it would have cost him a leg.

The accepted narrative is that the composer’s later grief over the death of his son motivated his drift toward a more communicative means of expression in his music. But Rochberg was always at heart a humanist, and already during the war, twenty years earlier, his worldview and aesthetic outlook were beginning to coalesce, as when he came to regard the destruction he witnessed at the town of Saint-Lô, where the Allies faced off against the Second SS Panzer Division of the German Army, as “a metaphor for the precarious state of Western culture.”

Rochberg, of course, was not the only artist to think this way. The war left its indelible mark on all the arts. In music, especially, its devastation and sorrow were reflected in the creations of composers on all sides, as demonstrated in Jeremy Eichler’s recent, excellent book, “Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance” (Knopf, 2023).

The varied experiences of Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten are examined at some length. None of them actually “saw action,” although Shostakovich was present during the siege of Leningrad and Britten performed on site for survivors of Bergen-Belsen. Rochberg is not part of the narrative.

Rochberg drafted a number of musical sketches during the European campaign. These later became the basis for his Symphony No. 6, completed in 1986. The work is tonal, yet harmonically extremely loose. I don’t believe it has even been recorded for commercial release. The linked performance is conducted by Raymond Leppard, which is interesting, since Leppard was regarded for so long as a Baroque specialist. But of course his repertoire was much broader than that, and he conducted a number of first performances of works by contemporary composers.

There’s another recording on YouTube, taken from a concert with Leppard conducting the Saint Louis Symphony, but the sound isn’t as good. So we’ll stick with this one, with Leppard’s own orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony, the orchestra he directed from 1987 to 2001.

What’s with the video’s moon imagery is anyone’s guess.

Rochberg died in Bryn Mawr, outside Philadelphia, in 2005. He left more than 100 works, including six symphonies, seven string quartets, and an opera, “The Confidence Man,” after Melville. At the time of his death, he was 86-years-old.

His service is remembered, as is that of everyone who made the push through on D-Day possible, so that the free world could achieve victory over fascism.

Symphony No. 2 (1955-1956), serial but, contrary to the composer’s later concerns, still emotionally expressive

Pachelbel Variations from the String Quartet No. 6 (1978)

Opening of the “Transcendental Variations” (1971-1972, the third movement of Rochberg’s String Quartet No. 3, transcribed for string orchestra in 1975)

PHOTO: Wlodarski and the cover of her book, with Rochberg in uniform