September 2016
National anthems originate as paeans to
a people’s self. At the very least anthems inspire solidarity and express a
people's self-image or -concept. They serve as the soundtrack of nascent
nations and established empires as well as of smaller human cohorts. Their form
and content range from the most bloody-minded of fight songs to the most
Utopian of hymns to the Creator.
In modern times the massive expansion
of global self-consciousness has led in some cases to anthems-by-committee
being superimposed on native musical traditions, so a given anthem may no
longer characterize a particular nation any more than all the people in
that nation may belong to one original nationality.
But most modern national anthems began
as hymns and were then transformed
by political upheaval or nation-building. Nations – from natio, Latin for clan, race or tribe related by birth –
are born believing in their own divine origin: that their people were fashioned
by gods who condescended to descend to earth, or who at least continued to
consider their creatures the unique "people of God." As such, the
national hymn confidently invokes divine aid in smiting the foe and gaining
victory on the battlefield.
The Old Testament is full of such
accounts of the deeds of Yahweh – Deus
Sabaoth, Lord God of Hosts – all of which are anthemic for the people of Judah.
"Rock of Ages" (“Ma’oz Tsur”)
is an ancient hymn common to both Jewish and Christian faiths since at least
the 14th century. It was translated
from Hebrew to German in the 19th century, and to English not long after:
Thou amidst the raging foe / Wast our shelt'ring tower.
Furious they assailed us, / But Thine Arm availed us,
And Thy Word / broke their sword,
When our own strength failed us.
"Rock of Ages" is a classic
example of simultaneous prostration at the feet of divine providence and of
militant self-worship common to the
root anthems of earth's peoples. In the Western tradition we can also begin with
the paeans of ancient Greece, songs of triumph and thanksgiving that preceded,
accompanied and followed battle. Paeans were as likely to be sung by private
armies like Achilles's Myrmidons as they were to represent an entire
city-state. The root of the word seems to be related to “healing”: a shaman’s
chant to the gods for restoration after the stress of battle. Achilles has his
men sing one after the slaying of Hector in the Iliad.
Before most Western peoples awoke to
their nationhood, however, there was the greater body of Christendom, and
Christian hymns that functioned to all intents and purposes as anthems. One of
the earliest was "Fairest Lord Jesus" (Schoenster Jesu), also called the Crusaders' Hymn, sung to the tune
well known today as "Morning So Fair to See." Its history is of
interest in light of Islam's renewed attack upon the West.
When Muslim armies recaptured Jerusalem
in 1187, Pope Innocent II called upon Europe's knights to answer that grievous
provocation. But the knights were battle-weary. In the spring of 1212, however,
a 15-year-old shepherd boy named Stephan inspired thousands of French children
to follow him to the Holy Land. At the same time a German 10-year-old named
Nicholas was rousing thousands of his own fellow boys and girls. "These
unsuspecting lambs of Europe began to gather in flocks to begin their
pilgrimage southward," records the Christian History Institute. This was
the Children's Crusade. By tradition these young soldiers, "escorted by
butterfly and bird," sang "Fairest Lord Jesus" as they marched –
to slavery, starvation, disease and death.
Centuries later this hymn was finally
collected in the 1677 Muenster Gesangbuch.
Still later, in 1842, August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, who wrote the
poem “Deutschland ueber alles,” heard
Silesian peasants singing the hymn and recorded it in his Schlesische Volkslieder. The first known English translation was by
Richard Storrs Willis, the Bostonian composer of "It Came Upon the
Midnight Clear," who published it in his Church Chorals and Choir Studies (1850).
Fairest Lord Jesus, Ruler of all nature,
O Thou of God to earth come down,
Thee will I cherish, Thee will I honor,
Thou, my soul's glory, joy and crown.
The verses go on to extol fair meadows,
woodlands, sunshine, moonlight – than all of which is Christ more fair – which
presage the degeneration of the text into the bland nature-worship of Vincent
Silliman's 1934 version:
Morning so fair to see, night veiled in mystery,
Glor'ious the earth and resplendent skies!
Great God, we march along, singing our pilgrim song,
As through an earthly paradise.
As befits an ancient nation, Britain
boasts the earliest and most varied national hymns and anthems, although to
this day she has resisted picking an official one. Perhaps her first
was the paean sung at a famous medieval victory. In Shakespeare's Henry V, after the English miracle at
Agincourt in 1415, the king instructs his band of brothers, "Do we all
holy rites./Let there be sung Non nobis and
Te Deum,/The dead with charity
enclosed in clay ..."
Non
nobis was the Latin version of Psalm 115, a
prayer of humble thanksgiving:
Non nobis, Domine, Domine,
Non nobis, Domine,
Sed nomini, sed nomini tuo da gloriam.
Not to us, O Lord, not to us,
But to your name be the glory.
The victory soon afterwards inspired
its own popular lay, which has become known as The Agincourt Song, Hymn or
Carol, or simply as Deo gracias. The
words' author is unknown but the melody is attributed to John Dunstable (? – 1453).
As in a topical calypso number, there are six verses recounting the
history of the campaign, of which the first is:
Our King went forth to Normandy
With grace and might of chivalry.
There God for him wrought marvellously,
Wherefore England may call and cry:
Deo
gracias, Deo gracias, Anglia redde pro victoria!
In 1740, it is well documented,
"Rule, Britannia!" was written by Thomas Arne, a close colleague of
Handel, and first performed at a masque for the Prince of Wales. While not
quite an official anthem, it fit the bill beautifully, being born in
bellicosity (that wildly emotional naval episode with Spain dubbed The War
of Jenkins' Ear), oozing confidence in divine favor, and boasting the best
fight-song chorus ever:
When Britain first at Heav'n's command
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sang this strain:
Rule,
Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons
never, never, never shall be slaves!
But it is "God Save the
King," whose roots are much older than the War of Jenkins' Ear, that bears
the distinction of being the world's first proper national anthem, although its
musical and lyrical histories are murkier.
Two key lines date from a gathering of
the fleet at Portsmouth in 1545 during the reign of Henry VIII; the watchword
was "God save the King" and the reply was "Long to reign over
us." This song too was first performed in 1740, at a private royal dinner
to celebrate the victory at Portobello. Thus 1740 would seem to be the year
that Britain woke to national self-awareness, a pearl formed painfully by the
constant irritation of rival empires. The first verse:
God save our gracious King! / Long live our noble King!
God save the King!
Send him victorious, / Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the King!
The second verse, no longer sung:
O Lord our God arise, / Scatter his enemies,
And make them fall.
Confound their politics, / Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix:
God save us all!
The earliest public performances of
"GSTK" were at Drury Lane and Covent Garden in 1745, this time in a
welter of rage and fear after the Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, had
landed in Scotland with his band of doomed romantics. The lyricist is unknown.
Traditionally a "John Bull" is cited – so perhaps the words were
never formally composed but simply popped out of the popular subconscious. But
it's in the music that the real controversy lies. An original melody is music’s
Holy Grail. Lyrics: a dime a dozen. A good tune: priceless.
Handel, Purcell, Arne and Henry Carey
have all been all credited with the melody, but the most specific evidence
points to Jean-Baptiste Lully (Giambattista Lulli), Louis XIV's court composer.
Lully supposedly was commissioned by the King's mistress to write a song for
the opening of the St.-Cyr military academy in 1686. He based it on a paean
already sung whenever French royalty put in an appearance, "Domine salvum fac Regem." The
song was not heard again until 1745 – ironically chosen by the Old
Pretender (James Stuart) as his own anthem as he prepared to invade England
from France. The outcome of that exercise determined which force would claim
the anthem for its own.
A dozen years later, an anonymous
lyricist (thought to have been Charles Wesley) set new words to the melody,
creating the hymn "Come, Thou Almighty King." Wesley’s motive was to
counter the deification of royalty so pronounced in "GSTK." Yet it
was not so long before that no one batted an eye at the identification of the
mortal king with God himself.
Come, Thou almighty king / Help us Thy Name to sing,
Help us to praise:
Father, all glorious, o'er all victorious,
Come and reign over us, Ancient of Days.
Lyrics do matter, on occasion. When a
band of British soldiers demanded that a Long Island congregation sing
"GSTK" during the Revolutionary War, the colonials defiantly sang
"Come, Thou Almighty King" instead. Nor would any Scot worth his salt
ever submit to singing the verse of "GSTK" that exhorts His Majesty
to "sedition hush, and like a torrent rush, rebellious Scots to
crush."
Lyrics matter, music matters, anthems
matter. When the British conceded defeat at Yorktown, their band famously
played "The World Turned Upside Down." And when the British handed
Aden over to Egypt in 1967, the band played Lionel Bart's Cockney plaint
"Fings Ain't Wot They Used to Be."
The adoption of "God Save the
King" kicked off a craze for national anthems that has never abated. Many
nations simply took over the tune and translated the lyrics into their own
tongue. Russia, Prussia, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and Liechtenstein all did
so, and the latter continues to use it. As one musicologist wrote, "There
is something alluring in the fact that the best-known tune in the world should
have no known composer." Words come and go, political sentiments ebb and
flow, but a great tune is forever.
Take Germany's anthem, "Deutschland Ueber Alles." This
beautiful theme originally belonged to Austria-Hungary; it had been adapted by
Haydn from an old Croatian folk song and set to a poem, "Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser"
("God Preserve Emperor Franz"), which poet Ludwig Haschka had modeled
on the lyrics of "GSTK," and dedicated to Kaiser Franz II on his
birthday in 1797. (The wee sovereign was five years old.) Haydn also employed
it for a set of variations in one movement of his "Emperor" String
Quartet #62 in C major, Op. 76 No. 3 (Poco
adagio, cantabile).
All for naught: once the Austro-Hungarian
Empire ceased to be in 1918, it lost its anthem to Germany, which had been
lusting for it all the while (though it remains in hymnals as “Austria” or “The
Austrian Hymn”). The song became the official – if stolen – Deutschlandslied in 1922 during the
Weimar period, in a conscious effort to allay political doubts about the
Republic. Hoffman von Fallersleben’s 1841 nationalist poem urging Germans to
place the unification of the German people “above all else in the world” fit
the melody like a glove.
Today only the third verse is sung; the
others have been suppressed.
Unity and right and
freedom / For the German fatherland.
Let us all strive to
this goal, / Brotherly, with heart and hand …
Beethoven’s Ode to Joy has also been
much coveted as an anthem. The European Union snagged it in 1972. Not if but when the EU finally folds, Joy will
again be a free agent.
Meanwhile, Austria was in want of her
own anthem. A nationwide contest was held in 1946 to procure one. The Austrian
poet Paula von Preradovic, born in Vienna of an old Croatian family,
contributed the winning verses, and the tune chosen is either by Mozart or his
close contemporary and fellow Mason Johann Holzer. “Land of Mountains, Land on
the River” eschews patriotic religiosity in favor of high-minded generalities –
just what the postwar world wanted. Thus Austria’s anthem has gone from a
Croatian melody with Austrian lyrics to an Austrian melody with Croatian
lyrics.
The borrowing continued as Italy too
gathered her forces for the leap to nationhood. As early as 1769, Felice de
Giardini composed music explicitly for “Come, Thou Almighty King,” contrary to
the usual practice of hijacking a tune by injecting it with new lyrics. His beautiful
melody promptly became known as The Italian Hymn.
But it was a battle hymn that Italy’s
patriots needed just then. That need was filled in 1847 by the poem “Fratelli d’Italia” (“Brothers of Italy”)
by Goffredo Mameli, a comrade in arms of Garibaldi, which was immediately set
to new, vigorously rhythmic and Italianate music by Michele Novaro. Sung around
the country, it helped spread the fever for unity and independence.
When it comes to Italy, arguably the
most musical nation on earth, we expect to hear an impassioned cascade of
arias. But musician and philosopher Balint Vazsonyi once described Novaro and
Mameli’s hymn as “mind-boggling triteness.” The poet Giusti wrote to Verdi as
early as 1847: “You know that the tragic chord is the one that resounds most in
our soul, but … the kind of sorrow that now fills the souls of us Italians is
the sorrow of a people who feel the need of a better future.” Mazzini
importuned Verdi to write “an Italian battle hymn – the Marseillaise of Italy.” But the great composer, whose operas were
full of characters, plots and lyrics that patriots hungrily seized upon, never
explicitly wrote such a hymn.
Mazzini was brilliant to ask for an
Italian Marseillaise. No other anthem
is more bound to the political fate of a nation than this masterpiece written
in a white heat one night in 1792 by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.
Revolutionary troops sang it on their march from Marseilles to Paris, and all
France went mad for it, singing it over and over until their voices gave out.
(Abel Gance’s film “Napoléon” immortalized this phenomenon.) The song
practically forces you to start shouting and pumping your fist, especially when
you arrive at
Aux
armes, citoyens! Formez vos bataillons!
Marchons!
Marchons!
Qu’un
sang impur abbreuve nos sillons!
Dutifully from time to time French
politicians and do-gooders (but I repeat myself) cluck over “impure blood
fertilizing our fields” and a few other lines, but so far even the French
Communist Party refuses to “meddle with our heritage.” The Marseillaise was banned in Vichy France and all Nazi-occupied
lands, and if it was good enough to drown out the Germans in “Casablanca,” it’s
good enough to be whistled menacingly and offensively at France-Algeria
football matches …
Singing the Marseillaise was and still can be a thrilling act of resistance.
But it never invokes God’s help against “tyranny’s bloody standard” – rather,
it calls upon “children of the fatherland” to defend Liberté in lieu of the discarded Dieu. La France catholique
remains the secular, godless nation par
excellence. Perhaps this explains her astounding difficulty in standing up
to Muslim aggression.
In anthems of the Swiss type – the
Austrian, Scottish, several of the American – there is almost a reversion to
pantheism. God physically dwells and manifests Himself amid the sublime beauty
of the homeland’s mountains and valleys, pools and groves, just as the Greek
gods dwelt upon Olympus and Ida.
Few peoples have had a fiercer ride on
the rollercoaster of history than the Russians – invasion, Oriental despotism,
liberalization, world war, sectarian coup, forced industrialization, terror,
collapse, rampant Westernization – and their anthems reflect
this. From 1816 to 1833 it was our familiar old "God Save the
Tsar!" From 1833 to 1917, a somewhat more individuated hymn prayed to
Russia's Bog (God):
And should dread war
arise, stretch forth Thy Hand,
To guard from wicked foes our dear, dear land.
To guard from wicked foes our dear, dear land.
Come 1917, the situation was obviously a free-for-all. Alongside the nationalist hymn "How Glorious Is Our Lord in Zion" and the Marseillaise itself, sung in French, there was a "Workers' Marseillaise" ("Rabochaya Marselyeza"). By 1918 the winner was the Internationale, sung with clenched fists. The Internationale, still the official anthem of the international Communist movement, has a great Marseillaise-like march melody composed in 1888 by Belgian socialist Pierre De Geyter to lyrics penned by Eugène Pottier eighteen years earlier, during the Paris Commune: "Arise, ye pris'ners of starvation,/Arise, ye wretched of the earth!"
By 1943, Stalin had decided that the Internationale's Russian lyrics, such as "Let's denounce the old world! Let's shake its dust from our feet!," made it sound as if the USSR had not already achieved these goals; moreover, like any grand artiste, Stalin had a better idea about nearly everything. With typical verve he rounded up twenty or so poets and composers and ordered them to create new words and music that "people will sing both in joy and in misfortune" (well, in misfortune at least!). At first the Poet of Steel planned to force Prokofiev or Shostakovich to cough up the melody, but he finally settled for a tune already used by the Bolshevik Party's own anthem.
The resultant "Hymn of the Soviet Union" lasted from 1944 to 1992, with a time-out in 1977 to remove all references to Stalin. After the break-up of the USSR, this hymn was retitled "Hymn of the Russian Federation" and given very different back-to-the-future lyrics:
Russia, our holy country, / Russia, our
beloved country,
… You are unique in the world,
inimitable,
Native land protected by God!
Having now arrived at the Putin era of
revived Russian nationalism, we note that a major share of that effort involves
bringing Russian Orthodoxy back from the dead – if possible.
Keeping in mind that true anthems are
basically religious hymns to a people themselves, we can scan the rest of the
globe rather quickly.
China’s anthem was written in 1935 by a
jailed poet – a surefire method for producing heartfelt lyrics! – who “chose” as
its object of worship none other than Chairman Mao; the title, creepily enough,
is “March of the Volunteers.” In complete contrast, India’s “Jana Gana Mana” was first introduced at
an Indian National Congress convention in 1911, with deeply Hindu lyrics by poet
Rabindranath Tagore.
The political turmoil in the Middle
East has meant that Arab anthems have very high turnover. Many of them are of
the “Arab fanfare” school of military-sounding brass; often there are no
lyrics. Israel’s anthem, however, began as a poem called “Hope” (Hatikvah) published in Jerusalem in
1886. The dearth of Hebrew songs at a time when Zionism was on the rise led a
Romanian Zionist to join the words of Hatikvah to a folk song from his native
Moldavia which Smetana had used in the “Moldau” movement of his great symphonic
poem “Ma Vlast” (“My Homeland”).
Israel does not officially recognize the Hatikvah
but its minor key and plaintive melody are haunting.
Japan’s anthem is also a rather curious
hybrid. The words were chosen from the ninth-century “Kimigayo.” In 1860, an Englishman who was the Japanese army’s
bandmaster was ordered to compose a melody. Twenty years later, a court
musician wrote a different, traditionally Japanese melody, but of course it did
not harmonize with the Western musical scale; so a German bandmaster was
brought in to make it sound like Gregorian chant.
Why does the Spanish anthem have no
lyrics? It seems to have been an oversight; none of the lyrics proffered got
anyone excited. Franco declared this “Marcha
Real” official in 1939. It may not even be a Spanish march. There was
nearly an international incident when the trumpeter at the 2003 Davis Cup final
between Argentina and Spain somehow played the wrong Spanish anthem. Apparently
between 1931 and 1939, the anthem had been changed to “Himno de Riego,” an air – with lyrics! – indelibly associated with
the Republic. Hearing it played, the Spanish team went ballistic … and indeed, it’s
hard to imagine how such an arcane switch could have been accidental.
Mexico almost didn’t have anthematic
lyrics either. In 1853 Presidente Santa Anna announced a competition to create
a Mexican anthem. The country’s leading poet tried to bow out, claiming he
wrote only of love. His fiancée Guadalupe not only disbelieved this excuse but
was possibly motivated by the large prize Santa Anna offered. She lured him to
a bedroom and locked him in. After four hours of captivity Senor Bocanegra
emerged with the winning submission.
Brazil has the good fortune of possessing
a samba anthem. Ary Barroso’s 1939 “Aquarela
do Brasil” (“Brazilian Watercolor”) is also well known as the torch song
“Brazil.” Ecstatic in its praise of the country, it is everyone’s favorite
samba song and has been the unofficial anthem for decades – in particular due
to the fact that the official hino
sounds totally un-Brazilian.
Australians vastly prefer the quaint
“Waltzing Matilda” (“a song about a tramp who camps by a creek and steals a sheep.
Three policemen arrive. Rather than submit to capture, the tramp commits
suicide by drowning himself in the creek”) to their official anthem, “Advance
Australia Fair.” No non-Australian really understands, but the sentiment runs
deep. The tune sounds a bit like “Lili Marleen” but is a Scottish melody called
“Thou Bonnie Wood o’ Craigielea.” The poet was A.B. “Banjo” Paterson, a true
master of Strine.
Other lands declare “God Bless New
Zealand,” “God Bless Fiji,” “God Bless the Hungarians,” “God Bless Our Homeland
Ghana,” and so forth. Such titles cut to the chase: solicitation of God’s favor
and protection.
The United States has the largest
number of competing anthems. Our country’s youth, deep religiosity, diversity
and democratic vigor combined to make it a hotbed of hymnody. All told there
have been least ten real contenders, eleven if you count the Johnson brothers’
anthem for black America “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” Between the earliest
introduction of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and its adoption in 1931, Americans
poured forth their belief in our nation’s special pact with Almighty God in
such wonderful compositions as “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” “America” (“My
Country, ‘Tis of Thee”), “God of Our Fathers,” “America the Beautiful” and last
but not least, “God Bless America” (Irving Berlin, 1918).
“The Star-Spangled Banner” has a melody
that was composed in 1775 for the Anacreontic Society of London’s paean to
wine, wine, wine; the tune was popular in the U.S. even before it was chosen by
Francis Scott Key for his acclaimed 1814 poem. “TSSB” was alternating with
“Hail, Columbia!” as America’s national hymn by the beginning of the Civil War.
The latter piece (music 1789, lyrics 1798) is set to a rather undistinguished
march and deifies George Washington while also exalting “Columbia” as a goddess
of Liberty like Britannia or France’s Marianne. Among its more noteworthy
lyrics are “With equal skill, with God-like pow'r, / He governs in the fearful
hour / Of horrid war ...” As the war dragged on, the North eventually adopted
“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “The Battle Cry of Freedom” while the
South went with “The Bonnie Blue Flag” and “Dixie.”
In 1861 a group of Manhattan
businessmen calling themselves the National Hymn Committee recognized that the
severely riven nation had better choose a formal unifying anthem, or rather hymn. The group nixed “Yankee Doodle” as
“childish,” and many others as “pretentious” or various species of “boring.” It
was not until the Great Depression that “The Star-Spangled Banner” burst
through the ambivalence and finally gave America a paean of her own. At least up
to this point.
I conclude with a lost verse of “TSSB”
that gives voice to what any nation needs to
survive: legitimate authority, belief in itself and in a power greater than
itself, faith, ideals, a moral compass. Once gods are lost, they are not easily
recovered.
O thus be it ever, when free men
shall stand
Between their loved homes and the
war’s desolation!
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may
the heav’n-rescued land
Praise the Pow’r that hath made
and preserved us as a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our
cause is just;
And this be our motto: ‘In God is
our trust!’
