CANBERRA music director Christopher Latham believes World War I was the last conflict that put great artists on to the field.

“In subsequent wars, artists do not serve but become conscientious objectors, like Benjamin Britten, but in World War I they signed up in droves,” he says.

“They had the misguided idea that they were part of a great adventure that would redefine Europe.”

They soon learnt otherwise.

With time on their hands before the inevitable slaughter, artists made art and nowhere more than during the lengthy Battle of Verdun in 1916, death on a wholly industrial scale.

Verdun, often eclipsed in popular mythology by the Battle of the Somme, will form the basis of “Life, Death and Transcendence: Verdun and the WW1 sketch book of Franz Marc”, the first concert for a huge French-Australian project called “The Flowers of War – Les Fleurs de Guerre.”

It focuses on Franz Marc, the most popular German Expressionist painter of his day, who died at Verdun aged 36, leaving behind a black and white sketchbook.

In the May 17 concert, Latham will show through projected visual images how those sketches might have been transformed into painting had Marc  lived.

Latham, who holds joint Australian French citizenship (his mum is French), is just back from tramping around the graveyards of France while putting together a Franco-Australian orchestra for the French part of “Les Fleurs” and he’s had time to think about “Life, Death and Transcendence”, the title of the coming event.

What are the “flowers” of war?

“They are the artistic creations of World War I – poetry, music and painting – made by artists who served as soldiers,” says Latham.

The French lost composers in spades, he says, but the Germans particularly lost painters, so the first public concert in the program, coming up in May at the NGA, will be a study in talk, music and visuals of “what those soldiers made”.

It’s a joint operation between the NGA, with the German embassy, French embassy and the ANU Centre for European Studies, supported by the Anzac Centenary Arts & Culture Fund and the French-German Cultural Fund. Latham has special praise for the German ambassador Dr Christoph Müller, who has, he says, “never hesitated to speak on a very difficult subject, unflinchingly”.

There’ll be a pre-concert conversation between broadcaster Alex Sloan, war historian Joan Beaumont and 90-year-old Jacqueline Dwyer, researcher and daughter of Jacques Playoust, a Franco-Australian soldier who served at Verdun. Latham will read from Marc’s battlefield letters to his wife, which hint at reincarnation and the Easter imagery of life springing up again.

The following concert performed by Louise Page and the Sculthorpe Quartet features mostly French works by Albert Roussel, who transported ammunition during Verdun; André Caplet, who served at Verdun and even Maurice Ravel, who composed while driving his truck to and from Verdun. It will conclude with the “transfiguration” part from “Death and Transfiguration” by Richard Strauss, the most important German composer of the period.

Latham has a reputation for ruining people’s mascara and you can bet there won’t be a dry eye in the house.

“Life, Death and Transcendence”, James O Fairfax Theatre, National Gallery of Australia, Tuesday, May 17. Pre-concert conversation (free) 6.30pm-7.30pm, concert (ticketed) 8pm. Bookings to trybooking.com/KVMM