The famous song "Ah Friends Goodbye", you don't know the secret

　These days, in europe where the new crown epidemic is raging, there is an old song that Chinese familiar, "Goodbye Ah Friends", which has been given a new connotation again - Neapolitan musician Delaney Vatari plays it with saxophones on the balcony, and also attracts residents of many Italian cities such as Milan and Venice to respond on the balcony, so that the world can show the optimism of Europeans, especially Italians, in the face of the epidemic. But at the same time, the origin of this famous song has made historians and the media argue endlessly.

　　At that time, Chinese came into contact with this song, which was well known in the left-wing movements of various countries through the Yugoslav film "Bridge", which was full of revolutionary optimism, and the original film was sung in Italian, and the protagonist of the song, Zadoni, was also set as an Italian guerrilla, nicknamed "Sardinia", which shows that the source of the song is Italy. However, according to scholars, a more accurate translation of "Ah Friends Goodbye" is "Goodbye!" Beautiful Girl", produced in the Po River Plain, this song was not born in World War II as Chinese thought, nor was it the "team song" of the European anti-fascist guerrillas.

　　In fact, in Italy, the hometown of "Ah Friends Goodbye", for example, during World War II and in the years after, a large number of works about the country's guerrilla songs were published, but no trace of "Ah Friends Goodbye" was found. Neither the guerrilla song magazine Panfilo, published in Palermo in 1945, nor the two-issue feature of guerrilla songs introduced by Faroclot magazine in 1946, did not mention the song.

So, if it's not "Goodbye Friend," what do real Italian partisans sing? At that time, the Italian partisans led by the Communist Party were collectively known as the "Garibaldi Brigade of the North", the most famous three were the 28th "Mario Gotini" Garibaldi Brigade, the Malayela Brigade and the Modena-Armando Brigade, who generally combined the Soviet song "Katyusha" with the whistle expression technique in Italian folk songs to create "Whistle in the Wind" as the official team song of the Garibaldi Brigade, and the Malayela Brigade also had its own team song "Song of the Lynx". It was created by Richriti, a guerrilla who went to war in 1944.

　　How exactly did "Ah Friends Goodbye" hook up with the WWII guerrillas? It turns out that its origin does have a strong color of spontaneous resistance to oppression. The melody of "Ah Friends Goodbye" is a fusion of the traditional Italian folk songs "Flowers on the Grave", "Door Song" and the Yiddish song "Coal Bag", and these songs are influenced by songs that reflect folk suffering such as "The Road of Saint James" that appeared around 1500 in France, and words such as "labor", "prison" and "gendarme" appear repeatedly in the lyrics.

Here's an episode where in 1919, a Yiddish-speaking Jewish player recorded "Coal Bags" in the United States, when American producers did not understand that Yiddish was a special language of wandering Jews in Europe, and marked the song as a "Gypsy" song. Interestingly, Yiddish is also one of the famous secret languages of the Italian left-wing revolutionaries. Beginning in the late 19th century, many Jews in France and Italy who lived a wandering life began to believe in and spread communism, and they found themselves using a Yiddish language that government agents could not understand. The secret societies of the European tradition have been further developed under the guidance of new scientific beliefs, so it is not difficult to understand why the Italian Left Socialist Party and communists were able to discover the beautiful melodies of traditional folk songs and give them new connotations of struggle by re-filling them.

　　At present, the earliest publication that Italian historians can find to record the lyrics of "Ah Friends Goodbye" is the magazine Lavipa in 1953, published by Alberto Cyris, a member of the Italian Left Socialist Party and a well-known folk song scholar. In 1955, the Youth Committee of the Italian Socialist Party made "Ah Friend Goodbye" one of the "guerrilla and democratic songs", and in 1957, the Italian Communist Party organ newspaper published "Ah Friend Goodbye" for the first time in the revolutionary song collection published on the eve of national liberation day (April 25).

The post-war Italian left, both the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, considered "Goodbye Friends" to be a song that best reflected the face of the guerrillas during the war years, and also the revolutionary youth who were active in various post-war movements against social injustice. In addition, in the 1950s, some Italian left-wing publications claimed that at the first World Youth Youth Festival held by the World Federation of Democratic Youth in Prague in 1948, Italian youth sang "Goodbye Friends" among left-wing youth around the world for the first time, but this festival was held in 1947. But this did not in any way prevent Lavipa magazine from declaring in an April 1953 issue that "Goodbye Friends" had been "widely sung in many countries."

　　In the 1960s, "Goodbye Friend" became popular in Italy and the west as a whole. In 1963, the Italian singer Yves Monte, known as Broadway, sang the song, which is recognized as the most popular version of the Western music market, and his father was a staunch communist.

In fact, European historians call "Goodbye Friend" a "Song of Freedom", believing that this song was gradually completed by different groups over the decades, it is difficult to see it as the work of "someone", but should be regarded as a product of the post-war left movement, and the optimism it represents that is not afraid of sacrifice and believes that justice will eventually triumph will inspire every protester who does not want to succumb to reality in the years to come. From this point of view, there is no need for us to dwell on the history of "Ah Friends Goodbye", just sing the present. (Wu Jian, Bai Mengchen)