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Political Prisoners’ Chorus Ludwig van Beethoven (1805)
Beethoven’s opera Fidelio is based on a French play of the Reign of Terror, that took place just a decade earlier, and it contains a scene in which the broken political prisoners are temporarily let out into the yard.
Staged opera operates without the visual resources of cinema, and modern productions give the director free reign to improvise with the setting, but however he represents or misrepresents it on stage this harrowing basis of the Shawshank scene remains indescribably moving.
It was on the eve of the 1849 Dresden uprising, after a performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony that Mikhail Bakunin approached the conductor Richard Wagner and passionately declared “if everything else goes down in the revolution, we must see to it that Beethoven’s 9th survives”.
Russia and the Rebel
Russian music about rebels is remembered most for its ecstatic love themes …
The Ballad of Stenka Razin. Poem by Dmitry Sadovnikiv (1883), music [trad?]
Stenka Razin (1630-71, leader of the Cossack revolt against the Boyars [feudal lords], sacrifices his young bride in the Volga River to placate his grumbling crew, and arouses them to carouse “where beauty lies”.
“Volga, Volga, Mother Volga, Make this lovely girl a grave!”
Stenka Razin — Russian Red Army Choir
(2) Spartacus. Ballet, Aram Khachaturian (1954)
Gladiator slave Spartacus (103-71 BCE) leads a slave revolt against Rome and frees slave girl Phrygia. They celebrate their short-lived liberty in the famous Adagio before Spartacus is captured and summarily executed by the Romans.
The Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia — Moscow State Symphony Orchestra, cond. Azim Karimov.
The great climax starts around 5:30.
Great Depression
(1) Brother Can You Spare a Dime, Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney (1932)
Anthem of the Great Depression.
The unembellished singing of Al Jolson captures those desperate times.
(Jolson’s once popular blackface performances are now deprecated for their perceived racism).
(2) Hallelujah I’m a Bum — Theme and variations.
Protest Scene from the movie Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936)
Fifties & Sixties
These songs are not socialist—very little music overtly is…
(1) You’ve got to be Carefully Taught, Rogers and Hammerstein (South Pacific, 1949)
From the 1958 movie of the Broadway musical.
(2) The Times They Are a-Changin’, Bob Dylan (1964)
Spirit of ’60s protest.
(3) Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, Pete Seeger (1958-64)
This version by Joan Baez — when will they ever learn?
Brass
(1) Fanfare for the Common Man, Aaron Copland (1942)
Fanfares are the preserve of the world’s rulers but in 1942 when Roosevelt’s vice-president Henry Wallace envisaged a post-War era of the “common man”, Aaron Copland wrote a fanfare for him, i.e., for the “common man”.
As the New Deal morphed into the Cold War, Copland fell under attack, in particular for attending a disarmament conference in 1949, which was attended by Einstein, Thomas Mann, Charlie Chaplin, etc. Copland was singled out for befriending fellow composer, Dimitri Shostakovich (sent from USSR by Stalin), whose terrified humiliation at the event ever after haunted Arthur Miller.
Copland’s fanfare is not socialist, but it’s intentionally anti-ruler. Its melody and rhythm re-emerge in Queen — We Will Rock You.
(2) Concierto de Aranjuez, Joaquín Rodrigo (1939)
The concerto was written in Francoist Spain, but its latter-day working-class appeal derives from its rehearsal by a colliery brass band in the movie Brassed Off where it is intercut with backroom conniving to shut the mine down.
“Do you honestly think I give a *** *** [about playing the government’s willing mule to the electricity company]?”
1. Yes, otherwise you wouldn’t have lost your temper.
2. Yes, otherwise you wouldn’t have kicked back “I have 66 quid to spend on something else”.The only question under capitalist conditions is “does anyone — yourself included — honestly think you’ll deliberately renege on the 66 quid (or whatever) you owe the electricity company?”
Capitalism has many ways of making willing and unwilling mules pay up.
