Schulhoff: The Communist Manifesto — Vocal Score

Erwin Schulhoff: Komunistický manifest [The Communist Manifesto], WV 100, oratorio for four solo voices, children’s chorus, two mixed choruses and a military band ∙ text by Rudolf Fuchs based on the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – composed in 1932 ∙ Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra ∙ Prague Radio Chorus ∙ Kühn Children’s Chorus ∙ Marcela Machotková, soprano ∙ Blanka Vítková, contralto ∙ Jiří Zahradníček, tenor ∙ Antonín Švorc, bass ∙ František Vajnar, conductor ∙ I. Je svrchovaný čas (It is high time) 00:00 ∙ II. Naše je země (Ours is the world) 06:45 ∙ III. To je náš cíl! (That is just what we intend!) 21:27 ∙ IV. Spojte se! (Unite!) 33:50 ∙ Recording: Smetana Hall, Prague · 20th / 21st September 1976 · © Supraphon Recording Producer: Paul Kühn Libretto: I. It is high time A spectre is haunting turope — Eighteen forty-eight Eighteen seventy-one Nineteen seventeen — the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies. II. Ours is the world. Where shall we start? We sing the history of class struggles. In ancient Rome the slaves, in the Middle Ages the serfs, in our own era the modern proletariat. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. For exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. Man is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, his relations with his kind. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but a chain of revolts. The modern productive forces revolt against the property relations of the bourgeoisie. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that put the society in a state of momentary barbarism. What an absurdity! All of a sudden, there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. An epidemics has broken out of overproduction, the conditions of the bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them How does the bourgeoisie get over this crisis? It destroys the products, it destroys the productive forces, it exploits the existing markets more thoroughly than before, it conquers new markets, it paves the way for more extensive and more destructive crises. Listen, workers and peasants! Before the bourgeoisie, the feudal lords used to rule, and the bourgeoisie felled them to the ground. The markets grew, the demand grew, steam and machinery revolutionized the production, and the industrial millionaires appeared, the modem bourgeois. The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned, before our own eyes, against the bourgeoisie itself. But not only has the bourgooisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself. The bourgeoisie has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons, the modern working class, the proletarians, the class who carry the future in their hands! III. That is just what we intend! People are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in the existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existenoe in the hands of those nine-tenths! We are reproached with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society. Precisely so: that just we intend! […] We are reproached with intending to do away with the eternal truths, with morality, instead of constituing them on a new basis. All past historical experience is called upon to show that the Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with property relations, no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air. IV. Unite! We disdain to conceal our views and aims. Proletarians! We support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things! In all these movements, we bring to the front the property question as the leading question. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution! The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains; they have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite! Alternative titles: Das kommunistische Manifest