Proletarian passion
| Proletarian passion | |
|---|---|
| Studio album of butterflies | |
|
Publication |
October 1977 |
| Label (s) | antagon music company, later Ariola |
|
Format (s) |
Triple LP, double CD |
|
Title (number) |
65 |
|
running time |
130 minutes |
| occupation |
|
|
Günter Grosslercher, antagon music society |
|
|
Studio (s) |
Butter Sound Studio Vienna |
The Proletenpassion is a political oratorio by the Austrian political rock group Butterflies . The work was premiered in 1976 at the Wiener Festwochen as a staged “ theater version ” directed by Dieter Haspel and recorded in 1977 as a “ concert version ” on a triple album (three long-playing records ) . Until the 1980s, the butterflies performed live in this program, which lasted around two and a half hours, in many cities in German-speaking countries.
In 2015, a revised version of the Proletenpassion 2015 ff was resumed in Werk X in Vienna Meidling. Heinz Rudolf Unger added new texts for this, which were published as a book by Mandelbaumverlag, and Eva Jantschitsch rearranged the music.
History of origin
Work on the Proletenpassion began in 1974 with the attempt by the Butterflies to formalize the musical structures of Johann Sebastian Bach's passions . Within the band collective , the term “ passion ” for the planned work was controversial because it suggests a story of suffering. In view of the historical progress and the successful social struggles in the long run despite all defeats, the term is shortening and misleading. However, due to its memorability, the title was retained as no alternatives were found that all members of the Butterflies could agree on.
The plant was completed after two years. Not only the musicians of the butterflies were involved, but u. a. also working groups of students and historians. The Proletenpassion was the result of relatively extensive source studies and sometimes controversial discussions. Individual songs that had already been planned were deleted. For example, according to the information in the booklet accompanying the album, part of the passage on the history of the Soviet Union was removed. There was disagreement among those involved as to the extent to which the USSR of the 1970s was still a socialist state or not.
After the world premiere at the Wiener Festwochen, the Proletenpassion was recorded in the Viennese “Butter Sound Studio”, which was newly built and set up especially for the needs of the group. This recording studio was later to serve the butterflies and other musicians with a similar focus in terms of content to enable tape and recordings to be made independently of the established music and entertainment industry .
Concept and content
In the Proletenpassion , essentially written by Heinz Rudolf Unger and composed by Willi Resetarits and Georg Herrnstadt , the structure of power and social issues of the European modern age between the 16th and 20th centuries are thematized in a mixture of different musical and literary stylistic elements. When it comes to the content of the statement, the focus is on the butterflies' concern of contrasting the “history of the rulers” or the “prevailing historiography” with the “history of the ruled”.
The Proletenpassion is laid out in the form of a historical review of the history of the revolutionary movements and the workers' movement from the peasant wars after the Lutheran Reformation to the current issues of the political left in the 1970s . This also included, for example, the international dispute with the military coup against the socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile and the subsequent state terror regime under General Augusto Pinochet .
Influences
The proletarian passion has shaped its own form of artistic awareness-raising. The first implementations of this form can be found in the early 1970s with the West German cabaret and political rock group Floh de Cologne , for example in their albums Mumien - Cantata for Rock Band and Geyer Symphony from 1974. After the Butterflies , this style was also used by others on various occasions Politrock bands were picked up (for example by the then existing group Oktober with their double album Die Pariser Commune ). All in all, this type of musical treatment of a broader political theme was most successfully brought to bear with the Butterflies with their album on the history of the labor movement.
The Proletenpassion claims to present the history of the past 500 years from the perspective of the ruled in the sense of the Marxist conception of history as a history of class struggles musically with cabaret interludes. A stylistic device here is to incorporate traditional historical quotations or to put monologues and dialogues in the mouths of historical personalities - from Martin Luther to Adolf Hitler - in a satirical exaggeration .
Subject
With their claim to describe history “from below”, so to speak, the butterflies followed the example of Bernt Engelmann , who wrote this in his 1974/75 “anti” history books “ Wir Subjects ” and “ Einig gegen Rechts und Freiheit ” in literary form of the non-fiction book had implemented. Another inspiration for the implementation of the proletarian passion was the poem " Questions of a reading worker " by Bertolt Brecht from 1939 (see under web links), which is printed in the booklet of the triple album instead of a foreword, and which the criticism (cf. . Historical criticism) formulated symbolically on the prevailing historiography .
The proletarian passion focuses on the German Peasants' War 1524/25, the bourgeois revolutions (especially the French Revolution of 1789), the Paris Commune in 1871, the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 and the subsequent revolutionary upheavals after the First World War , the conflict with German fascism between 1933 and 1945 and the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939 and the struggle of the anti-fascist International Brigades against Francoism . In the end, the work deals with the socio-political debates of the present of the 1970s . Thereby propagate the butterflies a political commitment in a revolutionary- socialist sense - as a doctrine and morals of intergenerational social class experience of the proletariat .
music
Musically, in many of the individual, relatively short titles (only a few songs in the work, which lasts around 130 minutes are longer than 2 minutes) , the Proletenpassion partly takes up the popular music style of the respective epoch and region and mixes it with elements from the more recent Folk and rock music (see also folk rock ). The repertoire ranges from classical elements to choral singing (different styles), regional Russian, French, German folk songs (see folk music ) - or traditional revolutionary songs from historical and modern folklore - to modern rock music in the style of the 1970s. Acoustic instruments such as accordions, congas, mandolin and guitars create a world-musical impression.
Various spoken introductions and / or scenic representations with cabaret elements alternate between the pieces of music , always accompanied by a contemporary musical background, sometimes aggressive and combative, sometimes melancholy, sometimes sharp-tongued and humorous.
Jalava song
The Jalava song is the most popular song from the Proletenpassion . Because of its snappy chorus and the hilarious plot narrated in the song, it was popular in the youth movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Resetarits was also the singer of the song in the famous record of the Proletenpassion . The song tells how Lenin, in October 1917, shortly before the Russian October Revolution , disguised as a stoker on a Finnish locomotive illegally drove to Petrograd . The hero of the song is the Finnish train driver Huge Jalava, who took Lenin, disguised as a stoker , on his steam locomotive and smuggled him through the controls.
The chorus of the song is:
Jalava, Jalava, you Finn, what are you laughing at against the wind?
I laugh because my senses are all together
and because we have progressed and because the world is turning,
and because my stoker understands something about flames and steam boilers.
This metaphor alluded to Lenin's role as “fueling” the October Revolution.
The rhythm and melody of the song are reminiscent of Russian dance songs and at the same time the rhythm of the moving locomotive.
Contemporary press reviews
The Proletenpassion , in its context its main author and the butterflies as a whole, were the subject of reviews in the feature sections of German-language newspapers and magazines in the late 1970s . Prominent journalists also spoke in renowned print media:
- “ Unger is a linguistically gifted man with a radical disposition [...] He hits the folk song tone , the Landsknecht tone , the Eisler and Brecht tone, he can carve Knittel verses and hammer ballads à la Biermann , as a Viennese he learned how to do it from Karl Kraus Quotes about boomerangs makes [...] "
- (Excerpt from a review by Hilde Spiel in the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung )
- " Seldom enough sneaks into the saccharified factories of the entertainment industry explosives [...] In painstaking detail work the five musicians and the lyricist Unger produced a contemporary oratorio about the struggles of the common people, which in the big chronicles never and otherwise only in the digits of Find space for losses and victims [...] The result was a polished, almost over-perfect opus that is quite unique in the industry [...] "
- (Excerpt from a review by Joachim Riedl in the Austrian news magazine Profil )
Margin notes
- Partly the proletarian passion in trade union educational work - z. B. with apprentices - used.
- Today the Proletenpassion , originally released as a triple LP, is also available as a double CD.
- In the fall of 1987, a slightly different version of the Proletenpassion was re-performed on a tour through the FRG and Berlin-West. a. in Munich, Bochum (Schauspielhaus), Oldenburg, Bremen, Braunschweig and Cologne. A supplement to the previously controversial title “ Song of the Party ”, written by Schurli Herrnstadt as an insert, expressed the current political attitude of the group Butterflies .
- The revised texts by Heinz R. Unger was on 22 January 2015 under the initiative of the director Christine Eder together with Gustav and Knarf Rellöm in Vienna's Theater Factory X presented. The “Proletenpassion 2015 ff.” Examines the classic Marxist conception of history from a post-Marxist, contemporary perspective - and in the end does not dare to look ahead, but to take stock of the present.
List of sections and individual titles
Note: The origin of the titles that were not or not solely written by Heinz Rudolf Unger are noted in brackets (also in the booklet of the Proletenpassion ) after the actual title.
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Proletenpassion 2015 ff.
The Viennese avant-garde theater "on the ass of the world" Werk X presented a new edition of the Proletenpassion with Claudia Kottal , Tim Breyvogel , Bernhard Dechant and Eva Jantschitsch , staged by Christine Eder . The Viennese daily Der Standard wrote about the premiere: “Just don't get ground up. Just don't give up. Seen in this way, the Proletenpassion is a brand new piece, as it is called in the theater. "
In November 2015, the Proletenpassion 2015 ff. Was awarded the Nestroy in the category Best Off-Production .
literature
- Heinz Rudolf Unger : " The Proletenpassion: Documentation of a Legend "; Europa Verlag, Vienna-Zurich 1989; ISBN 3-203-51059-6
- Inge Karger: " Political Music and Naive Music Therapy - An Investigation of Experiencing Political Concerts in the 80s Using the Example of Performances of the Staged Oratorio Proletenpassion by the Polit-Rock Group Butterflies "; BIS-Verlag Oldenburg 2000; ISBN 3-8142-0757-2 (music-sociological and psychological investigation, inter alia, on the social commitment of the audience of the Proletenpassion and the group of butterflies )
Web links
- Image of the album cover, track list and group cast of the butterflies in the proletarian passion
- Tracks (audio sample links) to three titles from the Proletenpassion: 1. Who writes the story (from Prolog); 2. Marianne (from Revolution der Bürger); 3. Song of the Ghost Train (from Paris Commune) - on the website of Heinz R. Unger
- Entry on Heinz Rudolf Unger in the Austria Forum (in the AEIOU Austria Lexicon )
- Table of contents of the music-sociological and music-psychological study by Inge Karger with the lecture text of the Vienna book presentation (website of the University of Oldenburg): Political music and naive music therapy (see under literature)
- Commentary and information on the proletarian passion
- Text Bertolt Brecht's " Questions of a reading worker " (served as an inspiring background for the proletarian passion - to criticize the prevailing historiography)
swell
- ↑ - UNGER, Heinz Rudolf. Proletenpassion ff. A new version of the “story from below” X ( Memento of the original from July 22, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed May 2, 2015.
- ↑ orf.at - "proles Passion 2015 ff" at the factory X . Article from January 21, 2015, accessed on January 21, 2015.
- ↑ a b booklet for the triple LP album of the Proletenpassion , p. 3
- ↑ Booklet to the triple LP album of the Proletenpassion , p. 2
- ↑ Mikko Alameri: Railways in Finland . Josef Otto Slezak, Vienna 1979. ISBN 3-900134-22-7 , p. 63.
- ↑ The standard : "Proletenpassion 2015 ff.": Sing me a little workers' fight song! , January 22, 2015
- ^ Nestroys: Wuttke and Orth are "Best Actors" . Article dated November 2, 2015, accessed November 2, 2015.
