Kominternlied (English: Comintern Song) was the anthem of the Comintern, an international communist organization.
Authors of the original poem (written 1926) were Franz Jahnke and Maxim Vallentin , [1] , Hanns Eisler composed the melody. It was written for "Red Mouthpiece", dedicated to the 10th anniversary of the Comintern in 1929, [2] and was first performed in March 1929 in Berlin. [3] In November 1930, during his stay in Moscow, Eisler performed the song at the apartment of composer Nikolay Chemberdzhi . He liked the song very much, and in the January 1931 issue of the magazine "For Proletarian Music", a Russian version of the song was published. In that version, only the first stanza was a translation from the original German - the poet Ilya Frenkel wrote the Russian version for this song. [3] [4]
Ernst Busch sang it in Moscow, in 1936, and recorded it on shellac. [5]
After World War II, Stephan Hermlin wrote a new text for Eisler's music in 1950s Berlin, retaining the second stanza from the original song. It was named "Song of the Working People" (Lied der Werktätigen). [3] [5]
The song is in many languages other than German [6] and Russian, [7] like English, [8] Dutch, [9] Chinese, [10] Spanish, [11] French, [12] Norwegian, [13] and Italian. [14]