Guernica
The nature of war changed in April 1937, when Franco’s forces, aided by German Nazis and Italian Fascists, deliberately bombed civilians in the Basque town Guernica on that town’s market day. It may not have been the first such atrocity, but it was the first to come to the world’s attention.
Eighty-five years later, although the ordnance has changed a little, the suffering hasn’t changed and the actors haven’t. There is a continuous line from the thugs of the 1930s to the thugs now waging war against Ukraine.
The online Hong Kong music magazine Interlude has a site The Horrors of War: Composers and Picasso’s Guernica, with seven short extracts of sombre music inspired by Picasso’s painting and by historical accounts of the bombing.