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The fifth child in a family of six children (two daughters, four sons), Charles Munch was born in 1891 in a plain brown apartment house which overlooked the fast-flowing river ILL in Strasbourg.
Like Bach, father Ernst Munch, professor of music at the Strasbourg Conservatory, was an organist. He was also an austere Protestant—a man whose stern gaze was firmly riveted on his family, music and God. Even so, the first ambition of his shy and unassuming son Charry was to be a locomotive engineer. By six, Charry knew by heart the exact hour when the fast trains would roll into the Strasbourg station, and was often on hand to watch them with ecstasy and envy. Afterward, he would trudge home to study violin with his father, or to prepare his lessons for the Protestant gymnase.
In the Munch household, life was harmonious but not gay. Sundays they all trooped to church. After a big dinner came an afternoon and evening feast of chamber music. Sometimes young Albert Schweitzer, later to be world famous as organist, religious philosopher, and medical missionary, dropped in (his brother married Gharry's sister). Summers, the Munches moved out to maternal Grandfather Frederic Simon's rectory at Niederbronn-les-Bains in the Vosges Mountains. There they played chamber music so much that the neighbors nicknamed the house "the music box." At 21, Charry went off to Paris to study violin under Lucien Capet, founder of the Capet Quartet.
Gas at Peronne. In Paris, life was both gay and harmonious. Charry lived in a modest apartment on the Quai des Orfevres, Ile de la Cite, soaked up French culture and the French way of living. Handsome, with a boyish warmth, he charmed all the women he met, including young Genevieve Aubry, granddaughter of one of the founders of the Nestle chocolate concern. When summer came, Charry went home to Strasbourg, "the most French of the family."
The harmony was soon disrupted. It was 1914; Alsace belonged to Germany. Within a few months, Charry and his brothers were conscripted into the German army. Four years later, after being gassed before Peronne and wounded at Verdun as a sergeant of artillery, he was demobilized at Cologne. He is not embarrassed by his onetime service for the Kaiser, asks, "Did not [Foreign Minister] Robert Schuman [who was conscripted to work in the arsenal at Metz] do the same? Did this prevent him later from becoming a French cabinet minister?" Like Schuman, Munch was able to pick his side in World War II. He conducted in Paris, scrupulously and often ingeniously avoiding conducting offers from the Nazis, and turned over every franc of his proceeds from concerts to the French underground.
"Because of Her." Charles Munch did not conduct his first concert until 1932, when he was 41 years old. Why did he wait so long? "It is very simple: it was so much easier for me to make a living as a violinist. I just could not afford to direct an orchestra earlier; when I was able to, it was because of her." He meant Madame Munch, nee Aubry, with whom he had corresponded during World War I through the International Red Cross and later married (1933); she hired both the hall and the first orchestra Munch conducted.
After the success of his first concert, conducting offers poured in from other