Suggestions for Composers affected by the two World Wars?

Don't forget poor old Anton Webern (Austrian), killed by a trigger-happy American GI while accidentally breaking curfew for an after-dinner smoke in the garden in 1945.

Both Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett were conscientious objectors (I'm not sure what I think about that). Britten went to live in the USA during WWII, while Tippett served time in prison for refusing to serve in the armed forces.

Enrique Grandos (Spain) drowned on 24 March 1916 when the ferry he was on crossing from Newhaven to Dieppe following a recital tour in England was sunk by a German U-Boat.

Olivier Messiean was interred in a German prisoner-of-war camp during 1940-41, during which time he wrote the 'Quartet for the End of Time' to be performed by himself and three other musician prisoners.

Among the composers murdered by or who perished under the Nazis include Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, Ervín Schulhoff, Karel Svenk and Viktor Ullmann.

In the USA, Samuel Barber and Marc Blitzstein were both commissioned to write music for the Army Air Corps during WWII, while Eugene Goossens and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra invited American composers to create short fanfares that opened their concerts, and the League of Composers commissioned short pieces, based on a war-associated theme, which the New York Philharmonic premiered between 1943 and 1945. Aaron Copland's ‘A Fanfare for the Common Man’ was the most important of these.

Going back to the Siege of Leningrad, while Shostakovich served as a firefighter and survived the Siege, his promising pupil Beniamin Fleischman did not – dying of starvation in 1941 at the young age of only 27.

Edit:

Dutch composer Matthijs Vermeulen lost his son during WWII while fighting for the liberation forces against the Nazi German army.

Another promising English composer - the first to be killed in WWI - was William Denis Browne in 1914. He composed a number of beautiful songs which have recently been recorded.

Sorry, rdenig - I should also have said something along the lines of 'do your own homework!', shouldn't I? ;-)

Perhaps tangential, but maybe still worth mentioning: S. Rachmaninoff, distraught at Russia's fate in 1941, began a one-man 'war effort', sending thousands of dollars worth in medical supplies at a time to Russia, by donating the entire proceeds of individual performances to the cause until his death in 1943.

The Netherlands:

Rudolf Escher (1912-1980).

"Musique pour l'esprit en deuil" (1941-'42) "a direct answer [...] to the destructive violence of a pernicious political system and its mechanisms of military terror” as set forth in his introduction to the score.

"Hymne du grand Meaulnes" (1950-51), inspired by Alain-Fournier’s renowned just pre-WWI novel 'Le grand Meaulnes' (1913) making vivid the world lost in the cataclysm that followed.

Reine Colaço Osorio-Swaab (1881-1971)

"Monument" (1946), commemorating the loss of her son John, who perished in Dachau.

Sedje Hémon (b1923)

"Nooit meer een Auschwitz" ('Auschwitz: never, ever again.', 1969) for orchestra.. Hémon is an Auschwitz survivor.

Hans Kox (b1930)

"Requiem for Europe" for four mixed choirs and orchestra (1971)

"Anne Frank" (1984) Oratorio

"Sjoah" (1989) Oratorio

Edit (1):

I guess we'd better add

Poland:

Henryk Górecki (b 1933), who lost a number of close relatives to the Holocaust (grandfather/Dachau, aunt/Auschwitz) but whose Third Symphony ('Symphony of Sorrowful Songs', 1976), to many veritably embodies the lamentations for the horrors of WWII. The composer himself resists such specifics, characteristically elliptically: 'the Third Symphony is not about war; it's not a Dies Irae; it's a normal Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.'(1)

Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994)

Father and uncle executed in the last days of WWI (Sept 1918) after being imprisoned in the Butyrskaya prison in central Moscow, where Witold visited him as a 5 year old prior to events. Fled Warszaw in 1944 on the eve of the Uprising, almost all of his work to that date being lost in the utter destruction of the city that followed. Only the Paganini Variations for 2 pianos survived that conflagration.

Edit (2)

Are you quite sure about Penderecki, Rdenig? I have always known Lutoslawski's wartime Warszaw café 2-piano partner to have been Andrzej Panufnik (1914-1991) -- who therefore also belongs in my list, really <s> -- and my references on both maintain the same. Startled by your remark, I checked: Penderecki (b1933) would have been 11 in 1944...

Immediately Enrique Granados comes to mind. If I can think of some others I will edit my answer

it brought america into the war because of pearl harbor. it helped us win the war by dropping bombs on factories and places of interest. also they dropped the two atom bombs of course edit: also they allowed the leaders of the nations involved to fly from place to place, meeting with other people and forming plans for the war

jean sibelius,fritz kreisler