Music
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I came across this, the anthem of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist).
I recall from reading The Monument the SPGB also had its very own song at one time. Is anybody able to put it to music?
Ruler of the Queen’s Navee Gilbert & Sullivan (H.M.S. Pinafore)
You can “hardly ever” ignore G&S when it comes to 1870-80s political satire.
With the Paris Commune and the notorious International still in living memory, “socialism” was in the air and, in egalitarian form, it pervades G&S.
The Rt. Hon. Sir Joseph Porter, KCB, First Lord of the Admiralty proudly reveals the loathsome secret to his brilliant political career.
He and the Major General (Pirates of Penzance) are bumbling careerists of the type who oversaw the slaughter of a generation in the coming Great War. But Gilbert playfully pillories them as figures of political mockery.
Noël Coward
Perhaps a mistake to include this conservative, but socialists may enjoy his sardonic humour …
(1) The Stately Homes of England (1932)
(2) There are Bad Times Just Around the Corner (1952?)
A Man’s a Man for a’ That Rabbie Burns (1795)
“For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
It’s coming yet for a’ that,
That Man to Man, the world o’er,
Shall brothers be for a’ that.”Burn’s poem was translated into German by Ferdinand Freiligrath, who was the revolutionary poet of Marx’s Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Organ der Demokratie (NRZ) during the 1848 Revolution.
When the censors closed the NRZ down Marx ran the last issue through the press in red ink: “red, red, red was its war-cry — today it is soaked in red”.
Freiligrath’s defiant “Farewell to the NRZ” was spread across the front page banner …
“Farewell, brothers, but not farewell,
My spirit they can’t slay!
I’ll rise again with rattling Mail,
Better armed to join the fray!”(Apologies for all the edits — twc)
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March to the Scaffold Hector Berlioz (1830)
Part IV of the Symphonie fantastique — Episode in the Life of an ArtistIn a narcotic hallucination, the now suicidal Artist of the symphony’s title, is drummed through the streets of Paris to the Place de la Révolution for murdering his unattainable girlfriend. With his neck on the block he hears her theme (idée fixe) as his head is cut off.
The Symphonie fantastique is a pinnacle of 19th century romanticism. It was composed in Revolutionary 1830 when Delacroix was painting his Liberty Leading the People.
The images accompanying the music are incidental, but they convey the grotesquerie of Berlioz’s conception.
I came across this https://youtu.be/WSLMN6g_Od4
Just to cheer us up 💃🏻Weimar Republic Songs by Hanns Eisler
Apologies for darkening the mood, but Hanns Eisler could write savage music.
(1) Song of the Commodity Brecht and Eisler (1930)
Capitalism thrives on supply and demand.
“By the way, what is a man?
Don’t ask me what a man is,
Don’t ask me my advice,
I’ve no idea what a man is.
All I have learnt is his price!”(2) The Secret Deployment words Erich Weinert; music Hanns Eisler (1929-30)
Most radical Weimar musicians assumed the USSR was socialist.
Postcript to music of the Weimar Republic
Alban Berg’s bleak opera Wozzeck (1925), to a text by Georg Büchner, (brother of the materialist author of “Force and Matter”, Ludwig Büchner, who was Marx’s bête noir) is perhaps the most enduring of Weimar’s [post-]classical music. It became popular despite its atonality.
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