World War I truly changed the way people saw the world around them, and that shift was particularly evident in art and music. On this episode we’ll hear French works from before and after the war. Franck was a full-fledged Romantic who never lived to see the war. His Piano Quintet exhibits the intense passion that characterized music of his era. Biographers have suggested that Franck was infatuated with one of his students at the time—a love that was not returned—and that emotional strife may explain this work’s extremes of feeling. Ravel, on the other hand, experienced the Great War firsthand, as an ambulance driver on the front lines. His La Valse, written just after the war, begins as a seeming homage to the waltz. But, as it progresses, the dance spins further and further out of control, the waltz itself becoming a stand-in for all the excesses of pre-war Austria, and its musical unraveling a metaphor for the destruction wrought by war.