The People United

“¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!” (“The people united will never be defeated!”) is a Chilean chant of protest and solidarity.

In 1973, three months before the democratically elected President Salvador Allende was deposed by a military coup aided by the United States’ CIA, the composer Sergio Ortega heard the chant shouted by a street singer in the plaza. “I sat down at my piano… When I reproduced the chant of the people in my head, the chant that could not be restrained, the entire melody exploded from me: I saw it complete and played it in its entirety at once. The text unfurled itself quickly and fell like falling rocks upon the melody.”

The text begins: “On your feet! Sing that we will triumph. Advancing already are flags of unity. And you will come marching beside me, and by doing so, you will witness your song and your flag blossom.”

As the chant inspired Ortega, so Ortega’s song inspired Frederic Rzewski: “I first heard Sergio Ortega’s song at a concert given by the Chilean group Inti-Illimani at Hunter College in the fall of 1974, which Ursula [Oppens] and I both attended. We walked out onto the street singing the melody, and it never left us from that time on.” Commissioned by Ursula Oppens to write a companion piece to Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, Rzewski used Ortega’s song as the theme for 36 variations. Completed in 1975, Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated! carried a clear political message when Ursula Oppens premiered it at the Kennedy Center in 1976, commemorating 200 years of American independence.

The message is contained in a readily apparent structure. There are six sets of six variations, and each set’s sixth variation is a summation of the motives and characters of the preceding five. There is also a plan of key relationships: beginning with D minor for the theme and variation 1, the keys of the variations follow the circle of fifths (A minor, E minor, etc.) until returning to D minor for variation 13. Another circle of fifths is employed for the last two sets of variations.

Since 1970, the chant has been adopted around the world as a call to unite and demand change. Reflecting on the chant’s universality, through the course of his hour-long set of variations, Rzewski quotes the Italian revolutionary song Bandiera Rossa and Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler’s anti-fascist song Solidaritätslied — as he states, “in reference to the Italian people who in the ’70s opened their doors to so many refugees from Chilean fascism” and as “a reminder that parallels to present threats existed in the past and that it is important to learn from them.” As a whole, the work represents Rzewski’s expressed interest in “the active relationship between music and the rest of the world.”

All this notwithstanding, the present recording concerns itself chiefly with the lived experiences of the Chilean people in the early 1970s. Recorded in 2023, 50 years after the 1973 coup d’état, this interpretation seeks to capture the suffering and the uncertainty of a time when Chileans felt the effects of Richard Nixon’s directions to “make the economy scream;” when Chileans knew a coup was in the works and then watched the bombings of the presidential palace happen; when Chileans “disappeared” and were tortured under the resulting Pinochet regime. To enter those states of being, this interpretation probes and highlights the rhetorical and dynamic qualities of Rzewski’s writing.

Guiding this album’s spirit are the unforgettable images of Patricio Guzmán’s The Battle of Chile and words of Isabel Allende’s novel The House of the Spirits. When Allende wrote her novel after fleeing to Venezuela, the result was “an attempt to recreate the country [she] had lost, the family [she] had lost.” Though Rzewski’s composition predates Allende’s novel, they refer to the same events, so this recording seeks to balance Rzewski’s global parallels and Allende’s recreation of Chile’s struggle.

Twice in The House of the Spirits does the chant appear. The second instance, occurring at the funeral of Pablo Neruda following the death of Allende, inspired much of this interpretation: “Suddenly, someone hoarsely called out the Poet’s name and in a single voice everyone replied, ‘Here! Now and forever!’ It was as if they had opened a valve and all the pain, fear, and anger of those days had issued from their chests and rolled onto the street, rising in a terrible shout to the thick black clouds above… Voices mingled in a single chant and the air filled with forbidden slogans as, face to face with the guns that were shaking in the soldiers’ hands, they shouted that the people united would never be defeated.”

Equally inspiring was this other passage from the same novel: “She felt that everything was made of glass, as fragile as a sigh, and that the machine-gun fire and bombs of that unforgettable Tuesday had destroyed most of what she knew, and that all the rest had been smashed to pieces and spattered with blood.”

— Kevin Lee Sun