Following Dr Barnett Stross and the British Lidice Shall Live delegation in their pilgrimage to Lidice in 1947 were eminent composer and conductor Alan Bush and his Workers’ Music Association (WMA) Singers. Bush had established the WMA in 1936, and they were visiting Czechoslovakia to participate in the First International Youth Festival hosted in Prague.
The programme of events set to last four weeks, launched with more than 17,000 young people from 72 countries, gathered together under the slogan “Youth, Unite in the Fight for a Firm and Lasting Peace!” on the afternoon of July the 25th, 1947, at Prague’s Strahov Stadium.
Here the festival was officially inaugurated to a proud fanfare of trumpets, and the blue flag of the World Federation of Democratic Youth was raised for the first time.
The Workers’ Music Association Singers contributed to the BBC “Britain Sings” transmissions to Europe and overseas for the duration of the war and had built up an excellent reputation for themselves with their performances of songs from the Resistance Movements and of the national songs of the Allied countries. Their choir was now to meet its unseen audiences on the Continent who, throughout the conflict, listened to those BBC broadcasts, knowing that discovery meant almost certain death. Meeting up would be a humbling moment. Under their conductor, Alan Bush, the well-known musician and composer, the choir gave concerts of representative English music and youth songs, sprinkled with a selection of international and partisan songs. But in early August the players also performed at Lidice a tribute specially written by Alan Bush to commemorate the martyrs of the village.
‘Lidice’ for Unaccompanied Mixed Chorus portrays the destruction of the village. Alan Bush‘s tribute website describes it thus: the music starts low and quietly in B Aeolian. The music is profoundly sad, but without a trace of sentimentality or self-pity. It ends with a beautiful, original cadence, the final chord being in B major.
The words are conceived by John’s wife, Nancy. I have in my possession one of the original scores. It is not difficult to imagine a choir of British school children repeating the performance one day – it’s never been performed in Lidice since 1947 as far as I’m aware. Due to his post-war associations with communism and the Warsaw Pact countries, Alan Bush was shunned by the BBC, who treated him as persona non grata in a form of British McCarthyism from the mid-1950s.
For more information about Alan Bush, the Workers’ Music Association and their visit to Lidice read The Path to Lidice, available on all Amazon platforms, in hardcover, paperback and Kindle formats.
