Horst-Wessel-Lied - Melody

Melody

After Wessel's death, he was officially credited with having composed the music, as well as having written the lyrics, for the Horst-Wessel-Lied. Between 1930 and 1933, however, German critics disputed this, pointing out that the melody had a long prior history. Such criticism became unthinkable after 1933.

The most likely immediate source for the melody was a song popular in the German Imperial Navy during World War I, which Wessel would no doubt have heard being sung by Navy veterans in the Berlin of the 1920s. The song was known either by its opening line as Vorbei, vorbei, sind all die schönen Stunden, or as the Königsberg-Lied, after the German cruiser Königsberg, which is mentioned in one version of the song's lyrics. The opening stanza of the song is:

Vorbei, vorbei sind all die schönen Stunden
die wir verlebt am schönen Ostseestrand
Wir hatten uns, ja uns so schön zusamm'n gefunden
es war für uns der allerschönste Ort.
Gone, gone are all the happy hours
that we spent on the beautiful Baltic shore.
Things were so beautiful between us all
and it was for us the finest place of all.

Another German song, Der Abenteurer (The Adventurer), begins:

Ich lebte einst im deutschen Vaterlande
Bei goldner Freiheit achtzehn Jahr dahin.
Da zog die Neubegierde mich zum Strande,
Und ich bestieg ein Schiff mit frohem Sinn.
Once I lived in the German fatherland
In golden freedom for eighteen years.
Then curiosity lured me to the beach
And I boarded a ship in cheerfulness.

In 1936, a German music critic, Alfred Weidemann, published an article in which he identified the melody of a song composed in 1865 by Peter Cornelius as the "Urmelodie" (source-melody). According to Weidemann, Cornelius described the tune as a "Viennese folk tune". This appeared to him to be the ultimate origin of the melody of the Horst-Wessel-Lied.

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