“The Last Great Cause”

Abstract As Stanley Weintraub argues in his classic study The Last Great Cause: The Intellectuals and the Spanish Civil War, the war awakened idealism among artists and intellectuals worldwide as few conflicts have done before or since. This chapter explores war-related activities in classical musical circles in the United States. After focusing on the Musicians’ Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, it addresses the writings of pro-Republican music critic Olin Downes and Franco supporter Gilbert Chase; also analyzed are war-related works by US composers Samuel Barber, Elie Siegmeister, and Lou Harrison. An echo of pro-Republican idealism is the recent performance of Henry Cowell’s Immediate Tragedy, choreographed by Martha Graham but lost after its 1937 premiere. Immediate Tragedy was reconstructed and performed on Facebook in June 2020 at the height of both the COVID-19 pandemic and social unrest in the United States, giving new meaning to the enduring power of “great causes.”