Workers' Hymn

Published in March 1886, the song was composed for the Italian Workers' Party, led by Costantino Lazzari. It quickly became popular, and is considered one of the most significant historic songs of the Italian workers' movement, alongside Bandiera Rossa, The Internationale, and the Hymn of the First of May  [it]. It was censored by successive governments of the Kingdom of Italy, including during the First World War and under Fascist Italy.

Despite the anthem's popularity, its authors were ashamed of their work. Turati later declared the poem "a juvenile poetic sin", while Galli kept his authorship of the music unknown, and was tormented by fear and stress in his later life due to its popularity and censorship.

Textual composition

The Workers' Hymn was commissioned by the first exponents of Italian socialism, particularly Costantino Lazzari, future secretary of the Italian Socialist Party. Lazzari, then leader of the Italian Workers' Party, wanted an anthem to inaugurate the standard of the League of Children of Labour (Lega dei Figli del Lavoro), a Milanese association of manual workers that advocated for mutual aid, popular education, the protection of workers' rights, and social emancipation.

 

For the text, Lazzari commissioned Filippo Turati, a young lawyer associated with the Milanese Socialist League, which was recognised for its intellectual character. Turati was reluctant to compose the anthem, but was encouraged by his mother, Adele. He was ashamed of the final text, and promised Lazzari to rewrite it, but Lazzari accepted it. The anthem was published on 7 March 1886 in Milanese newspaper La Farfalla, crediting Turati. On 20 and 21 March 1886, the anthem was published without crediting Turati in the party's journal, Il Fascio Operaio. The text was modified to fit the music.

Years after the song's publication, in his trial for the Bava Beccaris massacre, Turati was asked to declare his authorship of the anthem, which he affirmed. He said that the anthem was a "juvenile poetic sin", and retorted:

They have put me on trial so many times for those verses as incitements for class hatred. Instead, they should have sentenced me to death for inciting a crime against Poetry.

— Filippo Turati

Musical composition

The music for the Workers' Hymn was composed by Amintore Galli, then artistic director of Edoardo Sonzogno's Casa Musicale Sonzogno [it] and Chair of Counterpoint and Musical Aesthetics at the Milan Conservatory. The Workers' Hymn is Galli's most famous composition.

The circumstances that led to Galli's commission are disputed. According to one account, Galli was deceived to believe that the tune would be used on some other text than the Workers' Hymn, written by Luigi Persico. He recycled a tune he had composed earlier in his life, for some association that he could not recall. A letter from the mayor of Finale Emilia, dated to 5 December 1904, claims that Galli lifted a setting of the Tantum ergo sung in Finale's churches; Galli had lived in Finale between 1871 and 1873.

Lazzari recalled hearing Galli play the composition for the first time in February 1886, at Galli's offices in Il Secolo, Sonzogno's newspaper, for which Galli was a music critic. Galli played quietly to avoid the attention of the newspaper's inimical contributors in the neighbouring rooms. The composition was auditioned among Lazzari's comrades "in a cheerful carneval evening, which we held in the modest trattoria Iresoldi in Via Bocchetto", and immediately caught on.

The first edition of the music has not been recovered, and likely did not contain Galli's name. It may have been clandestinely printed at the Casa Musicale Sonzogno. Some contend that the music was composed by Zenone Mattei [it], a composer from Amelia, Umbria, who was first credited in a Swiss edition from 1894, printed by Zürich's Tipografia Industriale. Galli had lived in Amelia shortly after graduating from the Milan Conservatory.

Popularity

On 28 March 1886, the song had its first public performance at a conference of the Italian Workers' Party. The venue and performers are disputed between the hall of the Workers' Association in Via Campo Lodigiano, performed by the Società Corale Donizetti, and the headquarters of the Italian Workers' Party in Via San Vittorio al Teatro, performed by the Società Corale Vincenzo Bellini.

The song became popular, particularly in republican and socialist opposition to the Marcia Reale, the Kingdom of Italy's official national anthem. It was reproduced in many songbooks, and inspired several variants and parodies. In 1888, Lazzari sung the song to an international trade unionist congress in London, in the presence of John Burns, to a warm reception. Lazzari also recalled singing the song outside the walls of Casale Monferrato's prison, where an imprisoned socialist, Alfredo Casati, repeated the song to him.

The Italian Socialist Party, founded in 1892, adopted the song as its official anthem. It was sung in the earliest International Workers' Day celebrations in Italy. In 1899, the party declared the anthem one of the three best-known Italian socialist anthems, together with the Marcia Socialista Mondiale and the Hymn of the First of May  [it].

On 7 June 1914, carabinieri in Ancona killed three protestors during an antimilitarist march that sung the anthem.

During the Biennio Rosso, two years of intense social upheaval in Italy between 1919 and 1920, the song was popularly sung by socialists alongside the Bandiera Rossa and The Internationale. Fascist squads parodied the opening lines: Come brothers, come comrades, / Come, come, in a thick crowd was replaced by Come people, to the rescue / To communists, we break their bones.

Censorship

The Workers' Hymn received official censorship even before it was ever performed: five days before its premiere, the prefecture of Milan had communicated to the party that the song was not to be sung nor its conference hosted, in the interests of public order and safety. Singing the Workers' Hymn was quickly banned in public, and from 1892, it incurred a custodial sentence of at least 75 days as well as a fine of 100 lire. Numerous accounts record trials in which the prosecution and defence debated whether a defendant had sung the song or some innocent song. The application of the prohibition varied by province: during the early 1890s, the public prosecutor's office in Milan merely seized 9,000 printed copies of the anthem, on the pretext of legal irregularities among the publishers, while the police station of Reggio Emilia went further and arrested singers.

On 21 February 1896, Italy's Court of Cassation definitively ruled that singing the anthem could constitute a crime against Article 247 of Italy's penal code if an intention to incite class hatred could be proved. A note from the Ministry of the Interior to the prefecture of Bologna, dated 28 December 1986, affirmed that "by the judicial orders of Parma, Catania, and Milan", "it is beyond any doubt that the printed version of the Workers' Hymn must always be seized".

By 1902, the song was no longer prohibited, though it was censored again during the First World War and under Fascist Italy. On 23 August 1940, the anarchist Ciro Musiani was reported in Rimini for humming the hymn in a tavern, leading to a short imprisonment.

Galli's authorship

 

Galli was uncomfortable with his association to the anthem, and kept his authorship of the music unknown: he did not want to enter a bitter rivalry between the Italian Workers' Party and the Italian Radical Party for the 1886 election, and he feared repercussions from the Milan Conservatory and his professional circles. Besides, Galli was a practising Catholic, politically conservative, and a landowner.

Initially, the music was attributed to "Giano Martelli", an anagram of Galli. Galli was first identified as the music's composer during a police report in 1894, and in 1917, the Milanese Almanacco Socialista Italiano 1917, a socialist publication, publicly credited him. After the Battle of Caporetto in autumn 1917, the prefecture of Milan forced Galli to withdraw copies of the hymn from the market at his expense. Galli was kept under police surveillance for his life, under suspicion of being a subversive. The ordeal of the anthem led Galli to significant fear and stress, leading to an illness from which he did not recover. He was known to murmur: "Blasted hymn, how much you cost me!".

The eighth chapter of Alfredo Panzini's La lanterna di Diogene (1907) is entitled after the hymn. Panzini recounts passing a group of socialists singing the anthem, with a postman in the crowd asking him: "Don't we scare you now, rich man?" Panzini suggested that an additional verse in the hymn should be dedicated to the farmers of Romagna, and advocate "diligence and passion for agricultural work...two qualities [that are] not in excess". On the hymn's music, he reflected:

O good and gentle Amintore Galli, the music of your anthem may not exactly be beautiful, but it is terrible, or at least, it has a terrible effect. That note that grows and then breaks like a hurricane in the verse "The sun of the future shines": it has an indisputable effect.

— Alfredo Panzini, La lanterna di Diogene (1907)

Il sol dell'avvenire, a 2023 Italian-French comedy-drama written and directed by Nanni Moretti, shares its title with a phrase from the third line of the Workers' Hymn. The plot concerns the reaction of a chapter of the Italian Communist Party to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.