Rzewski: The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (& Four North American Ballads)

How Long Can a Song Resist?

In 1973, a song rang through the streets of Chile: The People United Will Never Be Defeated! A year later came the Pinochet coup, and the song became a password for exiles and resistance.

Two years on, American composer Frederic Rzewski turned it into a set of piano variations: thirty-six of them, nearly an hour long — he turned one song into a marathon of resistance that demands real strength just to finish playing.

An Album “Never Likely to Be Equalled”

In 1999, Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin recorded the work for Hyperion. A telling detail of dates: the session took place in August 1998, the release in April 1999 — the last year of the twentieth century.

Gramophone wrote something it rarely writes: “Never likely to be equalled.” That phrase has sat on the album page for over twenty years with no reason to be removed.

Thirty-Six Variations, Thirty-Six Transformations

The theme itself is only thirty-six bars, yet Rzewski makes it rotate through all twelve minor keys, climbing in building cycles of six. Listeners pass through waltz, march, jazz improvisation, and a fugue approaching Bach-like counterpoint — and at the very end, Rzewski leaves an empty slot for free improvisation.

Hamelin chose to improvise, and in that instant quoted Eisler’s Solidaritätslied — as if proving the Chilean song has always stood beside the workers of the world.

An Undying Pulse

Rzewski died in 2021, at 83. His whole life was spent on the impossible question of whether music can change the world; this album is one of the ways he handed the answer to you.

Forty-plus years on, the piano on this album still burns. Some music expires; some music is waiting for a revolution that has not yet arrived — this Hamelin recording is clearly the latter.

Further Listening

If Rzewski’s political fire moves you, Ursula Oppens — who commissioned and premiered the work in 1975 — re-recorded it for the fortieth anniversary in 2015. And if you want to know everything a piano can do, Hamelin’s recording of Alkan’s Symphonie for solo piano is the entire answer in one sitting.