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Music and History, National Anthem Edition: Italy

Almost all the anthems I’ve blogged about so far are quite well known. If I had given a quiz, asking my loyal readers to identify the anthems of Great Britain, France, and Germany, probably most of you could have come up with “God Save the Queen,” the “Marseillaise,” and “Deutschland über alles.” You might even have been able to whistle the tunes. Russia would have presented more of a challenge, but my husband, who is neither a historian nor a musician, hummed it easily—“I know it from the Olympics,” he said. But what about Italy? I had no idea, and I am a historian, a musician, and the granddaughter of Italian immigrants. Unless you’re a big international soccer fan and watch the Azzurri play, you probably don’t know it either. 1

The story of the Italian national anthem has many parallels to the story of the German anthem, because nineteenth-century Italian history has parallels to nineteenth-century German history. Both Italy and Germany consisted of multiple states at the beginning of the nineteenth century; both had unification movements inspired by political nationalism and dominated by liberal republicans; both succeeded in creating unified nation-states by 1871, and both those national states were formed as monarchies rather than republics.

Just as the “Deutschlandlied” grew out of the campaign for German unification, so did the song that became the Italian national anthem. It is variously known as “Il canto degli Italiani” (“The Song of the Italians,” another parallel to “Deutschlandlied,” the “Song of Germany”), the “Inno di Mameli” (“Mameli’s Hymn,” named for its lyricist, Goffredo Mameli), or “Fratelli d’Italia,” named for its opening words (“Brothers of Italy”). Mameli wrote the lyrics in 1847; they were then set to music by Michele Novaro. It was used as a rallying-cry throughout the Risorgimento, the movement for Italian modernization and unification. But when the Italian nation-state was created in 1861, it was not the republic that Mameli and Novaro had dreamed of but a monarchy, under King Vittore Emanuele II of Sardinia, from the royal house of Savoy.2

Vittorio Emanuele II, first king of united Italy.

Just like the “Deutschlandlied,” “Fratelli d’Italia” was thought to be too closely associated with republicanism and was rejected by the new Kingdom of Italy in favor of a royal anthem, the “Marcia Reale,” or “Royal March.” The lyrics of the Marcia Reale are actually surprisingly liberal—lots of references to libertà, for example. But it is nonetheless unmistakably a royal anthem: the opening words are “Viva il re” (“Long live the king”).

Allow me to pause for a genealogical interlude. When my mother was growing up, her maternal grandmother told her she was related to the house of Savoy and that she therefore had “blue blood.” This backfired on my mother when she told the kids at school, and a boy chased her around the playground trying to stick her with a pin so he could see for himself. When she retired, she did some genealogy, hoping to trace her royal lineage, and found instead that her ancestors listed their professione as contadino or contadina (that is, “peasant”).

On her father’s side, there was no claim of blue blood. Her father, Giulio Valentino, was born in 1895, the youngest of 13 children. One of his older sisters was named Italia. I’d love to know exactly when she was born to see if, as I suspect, she was named in honor of Italian unification. This will be one of my retirement projects.

Back to the anthems. Again like Germany, Italy became a republic after defeat in a world war (World War II for Italy instead of World War I). And like the German Weimar Republic in 1922, the new Italian Republic created in 1946 replaced their royal anthem with the older song from the reunification era.3 As I pointed out above, “Fratelli d’Italia” is much less well-known than “Deutschland uber alles.” I think this is due to the relative weakness of Italian nationalism. Italians even today are likely to feel more loyalty to their region or city than to the nation as a whole. They even have a name for it—campanilismo, or attachment to the campanile, or bell tower, of one’s hometown. My grandparents, both Italian Catholics who came to the US as children, were considered by their families to have a mixed marriage because she was from northern Italy while he was from the south. So it’s not surprising that hardly anyone knows “Fratelli d’Italia.” Or maybe it’s just that Haydn was a better composer than Novaro.

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Music and History, National Anthem Edition: Germany

National anthems, as the name implies, are an expression of nationalism. Cultural nationalism is the belief that one’s own nation, or Volk, to use the nineteenth-century terminology, is unique and should be celebrated. Picture children in folk costumes dancing folk dances and singing folk tunes at a folk festival. A political nationalist believes that the most natural form of political organization is the nation-state. If you don’t have one, the true patriot must work to get one, either by breaking up a multi-national state or by unifying many states into one nation. Unification into a single nation-state was the dream of both German and Italian nationalists in the nineteenth century, and this process influenced the developments of both national anthems. Germany today, Italy to follow!

While Russia’s national anthem changed with every change of regime, the anthem of Germany has remained surprisingly constant. The national anthem of Germany is the Deutschlandlied (“Song of Germany”), also known, from its original opening words, as “Deutschland über alles.” First adopted in 1922, it remained as the German national anthem through the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era, postwar West Germany, and the post-cold war re-united Germany.

“Deutschland über alles” is a national anthem like the Marseillaise, but it originated as a royal anthem, and not for Germany. The tune was composed by Franz Josef Haydn in 1797 to celebrate the birthday of the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II. Haydn had visited London in 1794-95 (one of the trips for which the London Symphonies were written) and had been impressed by hearing “God Save the King.” Since in 1797 Austria was at war with revolutionary France, it seemed like a good time to have an Austrian equivalent to Britain’s anthem. Haydn’s composition was given lyrics by Lorenz Leopold Haschka and titled “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser,” or “God Save Emperor Francis”; it is also known as the Kaiserhymne. Haydn used the same melody again in one of my favorite string quartets, Opus 76 no. 3, now nicknamed the Emperor or Kaiser Quartet. The Kaiserhymne served as the anthem of the Austrian Empire until its dissolution in 1918.

Portrait of Franz Josef Haydn, by Thomas Hardy

Meanwhile, a liberal German nationalist poet, August Heinrich von Fallersleben, wrote new words for Haydn’s tune to promote German unification. In this context, “Deutschland über alles” refers to placing a united Germany over its constituent parts, not necessarily over other nations. The new combination of Haydn’s music and Fallersleben’s words was sung by the liberal revolutionaries of 1848. But when Germany was finally unified in 1871 as an empire ruled by the Kaiser, the new government found the song to be too identified with liberal republicanism and instead chose a German version of, you guessed it, “God Save the Queen.”

When, like the Austrian Empire, the German Empire ceased to exist after World War I, its replacement, known as the Weimar Republic, chose the Deutschlandlied to reinforce its break with the recent imperial past and its connection to the earlier 19th-century liberal republicanism (liberal in the 19th-century sense and republican in its constitutional sense of a non-monarchical elected government).

When the Weimar Republic fell in its turn in 1933, the Nazis kept the anthem, but now the words “Deutschland über alles” took on a different meaning. The Nazis also paired the Deutschlandlied with the song of the Nazi party, the “Horst Wessel Song.” After World War II, the new West German government stuck with the Deutschlandlied, but without the problematic first verse, with its Nazi associations, or the second, which sounds like a sexist drinking song. West Germans sang only the third verse, which celebrates unity, justice, and freedom (Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit). Although East Germany had its own anthem from 1949-1990, Auferstanden aus Ruinen (“Risen from the Ruins”), after 1991, the third verse of the Deutschlandlied was adopted by reunited Germany, emblematic of the dominant position of the former West Germany in the post-Cold War era.

Next: do you know the Italian national anthem?

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Music and History, National Anthem Edition: Britain and France

Last week’s blog entry on the various Russian national anthems and their connections to historical events got me thinking about connections between history and the patriotic music of other European countries. National anthems are an expression of nationalism, one of the ideologies that arose in nineteenth-century Europe. Nationalism demands that an individual’s first loyalty should be to one’s nation—not to one’s family, or city, or religious denomination. Nineteenth-century nationalists understood the nation to be defined by shared history, customs and traditions, and especially language. 1 The national anthems of many nations arose out of their specific historical circumstances and reflect those countries’ own national identities. This is apparent in the anthems of Britain and France.

The oldest example of a tune with patriotic words being used in a public capacity (which can be our working definition of a national anthem) is probably Britain’s “God Save the Queen” (or King, as the case may be). It is first documented in 1745, during the Jacobite rebellion led by Bonnie Prince Charlie. Here is how the British royal family’s website explains it:

In September 1745 the ‘Young Pretender’ to the British Throne, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, defeated the army of King George II at Prestonpans, near Edinburgh.

In a fit of patriotic fervour after news of Prestonpans had reached London, the leader of the band at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, arranged ‘God Save The King’ for performance after a play. It was a tremendous success and was repeated nightly.

This practice soon spread to other theatres, and the custom of greeting monarchs with the song as he or she entered a place of public entertainment was thus established.2

The tune is probably older than 1745. I found references to it as originating in medieval chant, but that doesn’t seem likely. It doesn’t sound at all medieval, to me at least, and I suspect this is an example of medievalizing—falsely attributing a medieval origin to lend antiquity and legitimacy. Interestingly, the British Parliament has never officially recognized “God Save the Queen” as a national anthem, but that seems appropriate for a country with an unwritten constitution.

Portrait of Charles Edward Stuart, aka the Young Pretender, aka Bonnie Prince Charlie, by Allan Ramsay, 1745

In the nineteenth century, other countries decided that they wanted national anthems just like Britain’s—and I mean just like Britain’s. It became the fashion for countries to write their own words to fit the tune of “God Save the Queen.” Russia did it; the imperial anthem of Russia from 1816-33 was “The Prayer of the Russians,” set to the tune of “God Save the Queen” (replaced after 1833 with “God Save the Tsar”). Other examples include various German states, Norway, Sweden, Greece, Switzerland, Iceland, Liechtenstein, and (I didn’t see this coming) the nineteenth-century kingdoms of Siam and Hawaii. Even the United States got into the act, with “America,” usually referred to as “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”3 Most of these countries eventually replaced the borrowed anthem with a homegrown one, although the English tune sometimes remains as an additional patriotic song (as does “America” in America).

The first song officially recognized as a national anthem was France’s “Marseillaise,” first sung in 1792 by soldiers from Marseilles marching to fight in the war to defend the French Revolution against the Austrian Empire. Strictly speaking, “God Save the Queen” is an example of a royal anthem, as is “God Save the Tsar” (the American equivalent is “Hail to the Chief,” played to greet the president). The “Marseillaise,” in contrast is truly a national anthem. Compare the lyrics “God save our gracious Queen, Long live our noble Queen,” to “Allons, enfants de la patrie.” Instead of being addressed to a royal him or her, the “Marseillaise” is addressed to a national “us.”

These two anthems not only had their origin in specific historical circumstances; they also reflect each nation’s national identity. Britain’s “God Save the Queen” is a royal anthem, appropriate for a nation united under a monarchy. This identity is found even in the name “United Kingdom.” More specifically, Britain is a constitutional monarchy created by the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a constitutional settlement that was challenged (but not overturned) by the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 (when the song originated). The “Marseillaise” is a revolutionary anthem, appropriate for a revolutionary nation—the French Revolution began in 1789 when the delegates of the Third Estate declared themselves to be the National Assembly. It is telling that during nineteenth-century regimes that were counter-revolutionary—under Napoleon and the Restoration monarchs Louis XVIII and Charles X—that the “Marseillaise” was not used.

Stay tuned for a discussion of the anthems of Germany and Italy!

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Music and History, National Anthem Edition

Last week the Frederick Symphony Orchestra, in which I play viola, played our opening concert of the 2019-20 season. It was an all-Shostakovich concert, featuring the Festive Overture, the 2nd piano concerto, the Waltz from the Suite for Variety Orchestra, and the 1st Symphony. (I thought we should start referring to ourselves as a Shostakovich tribute band.) As is our custom for our season openers, we began the concert with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” At the dress rehearsal, the principal violist jokingly said to me, “maybe for this concert we should play the Russian national anthem.” He immediately thought better of his suggestion, but it got me thinking: what is the Russian national anthem these days? Some quick googling when I got home from rehearsal told me what I had suspected—the Russian (and Soviet) national anthem has changed several times to correspond with historical changes.

In the nineteenth century, the anthem of the Russian Empire was “God Save the Tsar.” You might be familiar with this tune from Tchaikovsky’s use of it in both the 1812 Overture and the Marche Slave. I first heard it as the theme music to the 1972 BBC production of War and Peace, starring a very young Anthony Hopkins as Pierre Bezukhov, which I watched in high school and which hooked me on costume dramas.

Obviously, “God Save the Tsar” was no longer appropriate after the Russian Revolution, and in fact a national anthem of any kind was thought to be inappropriate for a Marxist state. The Communist Manifesto, after all, ends “Workers of the world unite.” The new Soviet Union adopted the Socialist anthem, fittingly called the Internationale.

You might think that the Internationale would have remained as the Soviet anthem until the fall of the USSR in 1991—but you would be wrong. The anthem was changed in 1944, during what the Russians call the “Great Patriotic War.” Stalin set aside internationalist principles during the war and promoted nationalism to keep up morale; a new anthem was part of that strategy. 1 The new anthem, the “State Anthem of the Soviet Union,” composed by Alexander Alexandrov, is what we would hear at Olympic medal ceremonies. In 1991, it was replaced by a piece by the 19th-century Russian composer Mikhail Glinka. This “Patriotic Song” was a song without words, however, and Russian athletes complained that they couldn’t sing it at international competitions. In 2000, Vladimir Putin scrapped Glinka’s Patriotic Song and re-introduced the tune of the “State Anthem,” with new, less Soviet-sounding lyrics, now known as the “State Anthem of the Russian Federation.”

So if the FSO had decided to open our concert with the Russian national anthem, which one should we have used? Perhaps the Internationale, since the 1st Symphony was written in 1924 and the Festive Overture was commissioned in 1947 to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the October Revolution? Or should it have been “State Anthem,” since the Concerto and probably the Waltz were both composed in the 1950s? On the other hand, given Shostakovich’s troubled relationship with the Soviet state, it’s probably best that we stuck with the “Star Spangled Banner.”

Many other countries’ national anthems also reflect historical events; stay tuned!