Not sure if this is the best subreddit, but I figured it was a good place to start. I'm looking for vocal music from around the end of WW1 to within a few years of Armistice. Topic would obviously be the war, preferably regarding the desire or the occurrence of peace. It can be from any country, in any language, as long as I can find a translation for it. I have found a few appropriate options from America, England, Scotland etc. but would love to have some good ones in French or German as well. Bonus points for any in the languages of any other non-English speaking combatants.
I'm looking for more of a classical style of choral music, but anything that can be arranged in that style will work (which is probably most music at that time). A good example might be "I Vow to Thee, My Country" if that helps anyone.
I'm looking for this for a potential choral performance and if possible, would provide the end result if people are interested, though I believe the performance will be coinciding with the 100 year anniversary of the end of the war, so it'll be a few years, but I promise I'll deliver one way or the other!
Thank you all for your help, and let me know if there is a better subreddit to address this question to.
John McCormack was one of a few singers to record "Calling Me Home To You" - his version came out in 1918, though it was written a couple of years earlier.
He recorded it around the same time as "God Be With Our Boys Tonight," so there's definitely a war subtext to the homecoming theme.
If you scroll down to the end of this South African lecture, you'll find some Afrikaans (and generally South African) lyrics to "Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty," a transformation which I think is kind of poignant - the Boers were fighting on the side of the British and other Allies only 12 years after the Second Boer War.
That lecture also ends with "Sarie Marais", a song more linked with the Boer War, but nowadays used as a march for the Royal Marines Commandos - odd, maybe, because there's a verse in there comparing the British, or "Khakis," to crocodiles (Die Kakies is mos net soos 'n krokodille pes)....
Anyway, as a song about the dangers of war and the special someone waiting back home, it seems like it might qualify as well. It definitely would have been sung around the end of World War I.
So although the song "green fields of France" by Eric Bogle was written in 1976 it is directly about World War I and the soldiers that suffered and fought through it. Although it isn't from the immediate post-war period, I think it really shows the far reaching effects of the war and how the sacrifices of that generation were felt for decades afterwards. It's message is definitely in favor of peace. There's a nice cover done by the Irish group the High Kings as well.