Tippett and the International Worker´s Music Olympiad, Strasbourg
Tippett (top back row, 1st on left hand side) with the London Labour Choral Union in Strasbourg, 1935
Over the Whitsun week-end an English choir of fifty voices went, under the conductorship of Comrade Alan Bush, to take part in the first international festival for working-class music organisations at Strasburg. The membership was drawn mostly from the London Labour Choral Union and Co-operative choirs (in particular the Federation Operatic at Abbey Wood). There was a competition piece to sing as well as music for the concerts and demonstrations.
There were about ten choirs in our class. The judges (musicians of considerable international standing who are active in the labour movement) awarded a silver trophy.2
The most numerous entries to the festival were workers’ brass bands. Choral singing has not so strong a tradition in France as wind bands. There were choirs from various parts of France and Switzerland. Russian and Dutch choirs were, unfortunately, refused permits to enter the country by the French Government. The Czecho-Slovakian contingent was unable to come, and all workers’ organisations in Germany, Austria, or Italy only carry on illegally underground under the stress ofthe three forms of fascist terror.
The festival was organised principally by the Strasburg Workers’ Music League, with the help of other Alsatian music organisations.4 These musical and sports unions are very strong in Alsace and Lorraine, in Switzerland and France proper. The membership often runs into thousands. Benefits similar to those of our friendly societies are paid to members, and concerts, practices, and gymnastics are organised. All the unions have a political basis and join together for public demonstrations under the name of the united Front against Fascism, which the various socialist and communist parties of France have laboriously built as a weapon in their struggle.
The visit was too short for one to find out how the United Front was forged. But it was pleasing to see the sympathy the English rank and file comrades showed for it, many ofthe Labour Party members returning the clenched fist communist salute on the march through the streets.
Strasburg is an ideal town for an international festival of this kind. The older men fought in the German army and navy, their Sons are conscripted into the French army. The president of the Strasburg Music League fought in the Kid Mutiny in the German Revolution of 1918. Formerly a communist worker in Germany, he is now a communist worker in France. Working-class international solidarity has been forced on him by blood and war and revolution.
The Rhine, which flows near to the town and is the FrancoGerman frontier, has been lined by France with underground forts. But these forts were built by Swedish, Italian and German workers. So much so that photographs of the fortifications came out in a German newspaper. What are German workers to think ofa system which sends them to build entrenchments for the guns which are to blow them to pieces What is the French worker to think ofa system which behind the sham of national patriotism gives the work of national defence to less-paid ‘enemy’ workers?
To visit Strasburg, to stay with a working-class family, and talk to the men and women once German, now French, is to receive a lesson in international socialism which no books can teach,I was taken round the town by two boys of eleven and sixteen. They were still at school : nevertheless, they gave me two or three hours of clear-cut teaching in international working-class history. They showed me where the workers had torn up the cobbles to reply to the police rifle-shooting, a bridge where the workers had thrown cyclists into the river, bicycle and all, and a little narrow alley where theworkers took their wounded comrades. They told me how the police tried to force an entrance to this alley, and how the workers, from first-floor windows, lifted up the police bodily and threw them out the other side. This occurred two years ago.
There is an international tradition of working-class effort and Struggle to get free.
We in England have been in danger of forgetting what our forefathers did for us in the Chartist days and what our comrades are doing for us on the Continent. For, let us face the truth, a victory for the working class in France means an enormous moral and material support for our English movement. I felt shamefaced before these youths, who looked to England for resolutions of solidarity: youths who already at fourteen and fifteen had fought for the cause.
At the festival itself one could not help being struck by the delightful air of equality and informality. Everyone was a comrade, whatever language he might speak. It was like a foretaste of a free classless society but for the police ban on street music and the clashes that arose because of it. Over thirty bands marched onto the big festival ground playing ‘The International’ while thousands of voices sang it in various languages. The children were as free as the grown-ups. They walked onto the microphone platform, they talked to whom they liked. No one was ordered about. Occasionally someone called for space round the microphone so that we might sing there, or a telegram of greetings be read from a sympathetic group of workers.
Finally, we English comrades must not forget that we were practically the guests of Alsatian working-class comrades, whose general standard of living is lower than ours. To them we owe not only thanks, but solidarity. And if, as we hope, there is another Olympiad next year, perhaps the R.A.C.S. choirs will be able to send a genuinely co-operative choir. Personally, I would very much like to see a fund raised to take with us a number of our less fortunate members, to whom, more than others, it would give heart to meet and talk with Continental comrades in such a way.
A great number of the choirs at Strasburg were unemployed organisations from mass unemployment areas. It would be impossible to find money to take a whole unemployed choir, but we might be able to give a holiday to some of our comrades who need it.
1. This article was originally written for the Comradeship and Wheatsheaf (a journal of the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society), August 1935. It was reprinted in Music of the Angels, ed. Meirion Bowen, (Euleberg Books, 1980).
2. According to Alan Bush, the judges included the German composer Hanns Eisler and the French composer Charles Koechlin. The London Labour Choral Union shared first prize in the Mixed Choir Section with the Chorale Populaire de Paris. Nine choirs entered this section of the competition, coming from Belgium, Switzerland, France and England. It was not possible for choirs from Germany to participate, owing to opposition from the Hitler regime, which was thoroughly established by 1935. The Certificate presented to the LLCU on its success is thought to be in the possession of the Workers' Music Association in London, but it has not come to light: it may contain the names of the other judges.
3. The three forms of fascist terror were those of Italy, Spain and Germany.
4. No commitment to any political party was demanded of participating choirs (according to Bush), but their members had to proclaim themselves in principle the opponents of
(i) fascism, (ii) the exploitation of the working class, and (iii) every imperialistic war.
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