Trịnh Công Sơn's Anti-war Music Through the Eyes of Hoàng Phủ Ngọc Tường

Trịnh Công Sơn and the Music of Exile and Peace

In his final collection of essays, the Hue-born writer Hoàng Phủ Ngọc Tường (1937–2023) offered frank and profound reflections on Trịnh Công Sơn’s antiwar music, a lens through which he revealed his own contemplative view of a turbulent era. 

The book, Trịnh Công Sơn và cây đàn lya của hoàng tử bé (Trịnh Công Sơn and the Lyre of the Little Prince), published in 2013, compiles Tường's thoughts on this music and Sơn’s efforts to resist censorship. The book is structured in three chapters, each named after a famous Trịnh Công Sơn song: "Dấu chân địa đàng," "Tuổi đá buồn," and "Để gió cuốn đi."

Peace as the Core of Music

According to Hoàng Phủ Ngọc Tường, Trịnh Công Sơn emerged when “the streets of Huế were filled with military hearses and crowds of students protesting for an end to the war.” 

His first anti-war song, Lời buồn thánh, was written in 1964. At the time, anti-war music — boldly pioneered by Trịnh — was far from popular in the urban centers of South Việt Nam. Yet, as Tường noted, it was these songs that most honestly captured the era's grim realities.

“Faced with a brutal war, one saw a young, weary face, indifferent, with no hope for the future.”

Tường argued that while political pressure often forced artists to compose and sing for the collective, music belongs to the individual first. One cannot be forever expected to bury private pain for the sake of collective praise. As he wrote: 

“While channeling all efforts into the anti-colonial war, many grew accustomed to heroic chants and forgot that a human being is a lone traveler crossing the desert.” 

From this standpoint, Tường defended the choice to write antiwar music: 

“To oppose war is not an act of cowardice by those unwilling to fight, but a courageous stance by those who refuse to extinguish a fiery tragedy with more fire and blood.”

Influenced heavily by Buddhism, Trịnh Công Sơn’s songs often explored his concern with human suffering—sinh, lão, bệnh, tử (birth, aging, illness, and death)—through three central themes: quê hương (homeland), tình yêu (love), and thân phận con người (the human condition).

Trịnh found a way to transcend this suffering through a deceptively simple message, encapsulated in the lyric: 

“Sống trong đời sống cần có một tấm lòng” (“To live in this life, one must have a heart.”) 

Tường believed that if one could cultivate a heart that loves life and others, then worldly suffering might come and go like the wind, just as in the song “Để gió cuốn đi.”

Living in Exile on His Own Homeland

For Trịnh Công Sơn, anti-war music was his weapon in a relentless fight against war. To protect the freedom of conscience behind his songs, he went to extreme lengths to avoid military conscription by the Sài Gòn regime—starving himself and depriving himself of sleep to weaken his health. He chose to live semi-illegally, outside the system, a path shared by many of his generation that was "part exile, part adventure."

This choice came at a great cost. For 13 years, Trịnh lived in a state of internal exile—fleeing to Huế to write and publish his work, denied a legitimate profession, and treated by the authorities as a cultural criminal. He was, in his own homeland, effectively homeless, both physically and spiritually depleted.

Yet, even while weighed down by “cơn đau vùi” (buried pains), Trịnh’s music retained the wings of freedom and flew far. His work gained significant international recognition, even during the war. In 1969, his song “Diễm xưa” was a finalist in a Japanese song contest; in 1973, he was featured in the French Le Million encyclopedia; and in 1993, his lullaby “Ngủ đi con” was chosen by a Japanese peace organization to commemorate the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Seeking Truth is Also a Duty

Hoàng Phủ Ngọc Tường argued that Trịnh Công Sơn was not wrong to call the Việt Nam War a civil war in his song "Gia tài của mẹ." He pointed out that many anti-colonial wars in history, from the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution, also bore elements of civil conflict. Trịnh, after careful study, realized that this was a war into which the people were thrust, "like wood thrown into a fire," with no say in the matter.

For Tường, this willingness to confront a complex reality was a moral duty; everyone may be indifferent at one point but they cannot forever live in that indifference. He believed that those who want to live with dignity cannot be apathetic but must “seize responsibility” to actively pursue difficult truths. He wrote:

“Even if one does not know, or more precisely, does not yet know, history still stretches its arms to every soul and knocks on their door. So long as we do not close our eyes, and do not let our hearts go cold in the face of life. The rains upstream, though distant, will ultimately decide the river’s path to the sea, and the silt they carry will birth harvests along both banks.”

Through a career of anti-war music and a love for peace that resisted all forms of violence, Trịnh Công Sơn’s name will never be dissolved into history. Reality has already proven this: the very music that was once banned and suppressed has always found a way to reach listeners, at home and abroad. That endurance is proof of music’s power—or more precisely, the power of the human soul, of compassion, and of the love for peace. That strength has, and always will, give life to what is truly worth living for.

Bảo La wrote this book review in Vietnamese and published it in Luật Khoa Magazine on July 15, 2025. Đàm Vĩnh Hằng translated it into English for The Vietnamese Magazine.