>I was once told by someone who ought to know that two brothers Degeyter
>(sp?) met in court to litigate a suit over the ownership rights to the song.
>Does anybody know anything about this?
The story is true.
For those of you who read Danish we have at our website a short history about the Internationale. It is at: <URL: http://www2.dk-online.dk/users/is-dk/mo/div/intern.html>
For those of you who read German there is a book from 1954 by a Czech writer, František Gel: "Internationale und Marseillaise. Lieder, die Geschichte machten". The author of the article mentioned above says that though the book is marred by a lot of stalinist historiography it is a very valuable and well-researched book.
If a few of you are neither able to read Danish or German then here is the short version:
On June 16th 1888 Pierre Degeyter, member of a workers' choire in Lille, France, got a small book from a fellow choire member, Gustave Delory. The book was a collection of poems by Eugene Pottier, who had died recently. Delory wanted Degeyter to write a tune for a song about revolution if he found a good text. He wrote the melody for the Internationale the same night and already the following Monday, the 18th, he sang it in a pub called "Liberté". The workers' choire rehearsed the next 4 nights, and on the following Saturday they sang it at a party for the paper sellers of the French workers' party (of Guesde and Lafargue). It was a great success.
The local party leadership decided to print the song in the rather large number of 6.000 - but for security reasons the gave the name "De Geyter" as the composer.
The success of the Internationale was boosted when in 1896 the French party conference took place in Lille. Wilhelm Liebknecht and Victor Adler visited the town and 20.000 workers came to the railway station to receive them. But the workers were met with a nationalist demonstration which, while singing the Marseillaise, attacked the workers. But when the workers' music band started to play the Internationale, it was sung by the workers and much louder than the Marseillaise - and the nationalists, their priests and catholic students were forced to flee.
The delegates from all over France - and the international guests - took the song with them home. In the following years it soon became *the* song of the workers movement in France - and later throughout the world.
In the late 1890's Pierre Degeyter moves to Paris, and some time after this a Parisian socialist publisher wants to make a reprint of the now popular song. He easily gets permission from Pottier's family, but can't find the composer. Somehow his research brings him in contact with Gustave Delory, who in the meantime had become the mayor of Lille. Delory writes back, that he had been given all rights from *Adolphe* Degeyter, and refuses to give the Parisian publisher the right to print it. Soon after Delory publishes the song with Adolphe Degeyter as the composer. Adolphe happened to be a worker for Delory's city council at the time, and Pierre was very ill in Paris, so Delory thought he had a safe little swindle. Adolphe seems not to have been an active participant in it, but had only played Delory's game.
A couple of years later Pierre gets knowledge of the swindle by his brother and Delory, and he demands that Delory establishes the real facts. Delory doesn't reply, so Pierre has to go to the courts - for a trial which came to last 18 years. Delory, who was also a member of the French parliament, could arrange a long list of witnesses, and the court rejected a proposal from Pierres lawyer abot making a test in composition between the two brothers. In 1914 the court turned down Pierre's case - and this had probably been the end of the story, if not brother Adolphe in a letter a year later had admitted that it had been a forgery (a short time before he committed suicide). Because of the German occupation of Lille Pierre only got the letter in 1918, and it was not until 1922 that an appeal court final decided that Pierre was the composer.
Pierre Degeyter died in 1932 and 50.000 people followed him to his grave - among them some of the last veterans of the Paris Commune. It was under the bloody crushing of the Commune that Pottier had written the original poem. He never lived to see his poem published.
(BTW, Degeyter's funeral seemed to have somewhat more peaceful than Pottier's. Pottier had been an elected member of the Council of the Commune, and after it had been crushed he escaped through Belgium to England. In 1873 be was condemned to death in absentia, and the same year he moved to Boston, USA, where he was also politcally active - i.a. in founding the Socialist Labour party. After a general amnesty to supporters of the Commune in 1880 he returned to Paris, where he died in 1887. Ten thousand people attended the funeral, which was brutally attacked by the police to grab a red flag. Several people were seriously injured and a protest meeting was attended by 2.000 people. - From Ian Birchall's article in Socialist Worker Review, issue 82, December 1985. Birchall credits a book - Maurice Dommanget: "Eugene Pottier", Paris 1971 - for the info.)
<SNIP>
>Maybe this someone also knows about the so-called Pierre Degeyter
>Club (formed sometime in the '30s I guess) for serious American composers
>with a leftist urge, such as Aaron Copland?
Sorry, no.
All the best Jorn
-- Jorn Andersen
Internationale Socialister Copenhagen, Denmark IS-WWW: http://www2.dk-online.dk/users/is-dk/