He called me once at two past midnight Bura to confide in me an idea. He also has this habit, he calls in the dead of night from the pub to tell a joke, sing a song or believe some stupid idea.
He reads, he says, how the world is once again making fun of the anthem of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a plagiarism of the opening theme from the American film National Lampoon's Animal House - a video recently appeared on the popular social network Reddit with a comparison of the Bosnian anthem Intermezzo by Dušan Šestić from 1999, and uncomfortably identical themes from the Hollywood comedy about student fraternities, translated to us as, of course, Menagerie - so Buret came up with an idea. If it has to be plagiarism, he says, then it's best to steal John Cage's famous avant-garde composition 4'33 from 1949 for the anthem.
- But that's four and a half minutes of complete silence in three movements - I said.
- I know, of course - rushed Bure. - That's why I imagined that only the first movement would be performed.
The idea may be silly, but you have to admit it's brilliant. Today at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Amel Tuka wins the 800 m and climbs to the podium, a hundred thousand people at the Maracana stand up to pay their respects to the Bosnia and Herzegovina national anthem, and as the blue-yellow flag goes up the flagpole, a minute of absolute silence begins. "Minute of silence" - that is, understandably, what the anthem would be called - as a minute of silence for Bosnia and Herzegovina, sad and screwed up, according to the latest Bloomberg Misery index, the second most miserable country in the world, a country with 15 percent illiterates, an Austrian ambassador instead of a president and an American teenage comedy star instead hymns.
Of course, it's not the most pleasant thing when it turns out that your national anthem is identical to the theme from some silly Hollywood comedy - at least it's from Star Wars, or some spaghetti western by Sergio Leone, so come on - but the critics weren't particularly famous for comparing Šestić's melody with with the menagerie of Zverinjak. The music for that film was composed, namely, by the famous American composer Elmer Bernstein - the author of music for films such as The Magnificent Seven or Scorcese's Cape Fear - who for the opening credits of Animal House just adapted the theme from the famous Akademische Festouvertüre, Opus 80, by the great German composer Johannes Brahms. No, it doesn't matter if the anthem is identical to the opening theme of an American teen comedy or the theme from one of the most famous concert overtures in the entire history of classical music.
I don't know whether Banjo Luka composer Dušan Šestić had that in mind - or at least subconsciously - but it makes sense.
After all, Šestić arrived in Bosnia before the war straight from Split, where he played in the Croatian National Theater Opera and the Military Orchestra of the JNA, which held rehearsals in the barracks at the Gripe fortress, across the street from my parents' home. When I have the chance, I will certainly ask him if he was also in the barracks on Gripe on that September day in 1991 when, in one of the most grotesque episodes of the famous Homeland War, the Croatian Army - just like in spectacular war action movies - evacuated the entire neighborhood and besieged the infamous fortress, and at the end of the dramatic siege, drove ten frightened musicians from the military orchestra out of the barracks. Be that as it may, Šestić went to Banja Luka after that, and when eight years later he composed the new national anthem of BiH, it would rather be that, as a classical musician of the Split Opera, somewhere in his mind - consciously or subconsciously, it doesn't matter - was a Brahms theme, but American comedy peak.
However, this is not the meaning I meant, because the theme that Dušan Šestić allegedly stole from Elmer Bernstein, and the latter borrowed from Johannes Brahms, is not even - Brahms's. Johannes Brahms, in addition to being a pianist virtuoso and one of the greatest composers of all time, was also a big joker, and when he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Breslau, today's Wrocław, in 1880, Brahms sent an ordinary postcard as a sign of thanks . His friend and conductor Bernard Scholz explained to him that it was a nice joke, but that he was still expected to write some kind of beautiful piece of music, a symphony or something similar. To the horror of hardened academic heads, the old jester then wrote, as he later explained, "a very noisy potpourri of student drunken songs à la Suppé" for the awarding of an honorary doctorate at the University.
Franz von Suppé, the father of the Viennese operetta and one of the most popular composers of the time - born, here's another convenient connection, precisely in Split, at the foot of the barracks on Gripe - in his cheerful and comic style wrote the overture to Flotte Burschen, conceived as a colloplet of student of songs, so Brahms, "à la Suppé", incorporated songs that students sang in beer halls into his Festival Overture. Among those songs was "Wir hatten gebauet ein staatliches Haus" - "We built a state house" - a popular and long-banned patriotic song written for the student fraternity in Jena in 1819 by the German writer and journalist August von Binzer, in which the students called for German unification throughout the 19th century: as an unofficial post-war anthem, "Wir hatten gebauet ein staatliches Haus" was sung, for example, in the Bundestag, when the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany was adopted in 1949.
It makes sense, as I said: exactly that patriotic-drunken anthem of the students of the University of Jena - it makes sense - Brahms borrowed from Benzer for his university Akademische Festouvertüre; it was this student patriotic-drunken song - it makes sense - that Bernstein borrowed from Brahms for the theme of a comedy about student fraternities; exactly that student patriotic-drunken song - is it even possible to make more sense? - Dušan Šestić ended up singing the anthem of the country with fifteen percent illiterates. Just in case you don't find it funny, you might find it funnier if instead of Brahms' cheerful Festouvertüre, Opus 80, his Opus 81, written in the same summer, was taken for the national anthem of Bosnia and Herzegovina, that is - Tragische Ouvertüre, Tragic Overture.
Finally, for a poor, backward, isolated and dismembered country under a foreign protectorate - where a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line and the rest solely on foreign, mostly American aid - there are hardly any more appropriate anthems than the German patriotic song entitled "We have built a national home ".
Eh, yes: the song "Wir hatten gebauet ein staatliches Haus" also served as the anthem of the Federated States of Micronesia.
Only Micronesia is not to be trifled with.
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