Can any piece even begin to encompass that? Certainly for me not unless there are words there, too.

 I'd nominate unhesitatingly as my candidate nearest to success in that field a work commissioned for the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral, though not Britten's War Requiem, but Tippett's opera King Priam, which uses Homer's Iliad as a springboard for examining the effects war has at many levels: the desperate choices, the loss, the brutalisation and futility for victors and vanquished alike; it's uncompromising and unsentimental, and despite the fact that it exploits Brechtian alienation effects, extraordinarily involving, moving, and most importantly, thought provoking.

r,

A year ago would you even have heard RVW 3 and 6?

 But it's a very apt point: the aching beauty of 3 and the descent into detached resignation of 6 are very personal reactions to war from a man who had experienced its terrors and loss at first hand, even though he need not have done so (he volunteered to drive ambulances in France during WW1 although he was already past the age where he was obliged to) and had distilled his reactions rather than slamming them down raw.

I popped in on this thread half an hour ago and thought of Xenakis, but then I started thinking about how almost all the music that seems to say anything significant about war can also be read in a completely different way, nothing specific to do with war at all. I suppose that's how music works, at least when it responds rather than depicts (as Richard says), and sometimes even when it depicts.

Strange, though, that - operas or works with text being a bit of an exception - I can't think of a piece of music that seems to me to be so intrinsically about war that it's the first and main thing I think of in connection with that piece, unlike for example novels (I do think of Angelopoulos' The Travelling Players as a film about the Greek military junta, or of Gravity's Rainbow as 'a novel about the Second World War', although not in the limiting sort of sense that I think of certain poets as 'First World War poets').

At first I was thinking sentimentality rather than sentiment but actually I suspect you're right. (As usual.)

One of the first things that sprang to my mind was Zimmermann's Die Soldaten. Not actually about war at all though... 'about' injustice if it's about anything. Still, there is a mushroom cloud at the end...

There's also this, possibly relevant disk:



I haven't listened to it, but I do have it lying about on my hard disk somewhere.

With Shostakovich 8 and KING PRIAM already mentioned, all we can do is look for suitable "supporting material" for those weighty works, in which much is already said.

Some other works which I'd program if we were making any kind of series might be Schoenberg's A SURVIVOR FROM WARSAW...  then there's quite a lot of Prokofiev, including THE STORY OF AN ACTUAL PERSON (also transl as THE HISTORY OF A REAL MAN) which contrasts the heroism of a war hero against the wretched banality of his hospitalisation...   and Kutuzov's big aria Когда, когда.. ("When, oh when will it stop..?" from WAR & PEACE.  (Although W&P is certainly a "soviet realist" work, there's very little glorification of war in it...  the moment when the escaped lunatics are made to say the Holy Mass is deeply symbolic).  I hope I'll be forgiven for mentioning Ullmann's THE EMPEROR OF ATLANTIS again... the blackest of comedies ever written, about the "Final Solution"...

I'm not so sure about the "noble dirge" bit... I've always heard the upper strings as sighs of pain in that movement. Maybe Biber wasn't quite as obedient to his masters as might at first appear...? or am I turning him into Shostakovich??