Home, CV, Press, Music, Video, Photos, Lyrics, Poetry, Recipe Archive, Contact
Joe Dolce
_______________________________________
GSTQ
Well may we say God save the Queen… Gough Whitlam
One of the biggest surprises I recall, when moving to Australia, in 1979, from the States, was my discovery that the classic piece of patriotic Americana, that I had been singing since a child, America (My Country ‘tis of thee), was also known, in Australia, as God Save the Queen – same melody, but with different words. And quite a different patriotism!
God Save the Queen was the National Anthem of Australia, until replaced, in 1984, by Advance Australia Fair. England, the country most commonly associated with the song, ironically, has no official National Anthem of its own.
GSTQ is, of course, the common royal anthem of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, although Scotland has its own national song, and Wales its own national anthem. But GSTQ’s official status in the UK derives from custom and use, not from Royal Proclamation, or any Act of Parliament.
God save our gracious Queen,
Long live our noble Queen,
God save the Queen!
Send her victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us;
God save the Queen!
No one knows for certain who came up with the persuasive melody. John Bull, an English composer, is thought to have written the music during the reign of Elizabeth I. Henry Carey is also referenced as having possibly composed it, in 1742. It has been attributed to Henry Purcell and John Dowland, and some musicologists credit Thomas Ravenscroft, one of Bull’s contemporaries, as having adapted it from an old Scots carol, Remember O Thou Man, (which is in a minor key, although to my ear, this is way too far of a stretch to be credible). Its true origins remain unknown.
On the nature of the anthem’s musical charm, Garrick Alder cynically commented:
It's a catchy, bombastic, easy-to-follow, unadventurous tune, with a flexible and innately 'vocal' structure, and these factors have made it consistently ideal for anthemic purposes.
GSTQ is the ultimate off-the-peg national anthem although Beethoven disagreed, and wrote:
I have to show the English a little of what a blessing God Save the King is.
In 1796, philosopher Jeremy Bentham praised the tune:
the melody recommending itself by beauty to the most polished ears, and by its simplicity to the rudest ear.
The author of the English lyrics remains unknown, as well, although the melody has had words authored by many different writers, in many different languages. The phrase, God Save the King itself, dates back as far as a coronation anthem used for King Edgar, in 973, with words from the Bible:
…And all the people rejoic’d, and said:
God save the King! Long live the King!
May the King live for ever,
Amen, Allelujah. 1 Kings 1:38–40
The first copy of the completed lyric appeared in Gentleman’s Magazine in 1745; without attribution. That year, British composer, Thomas Arne, the author of Rule Britanica!, arranged it, with the title, God Save Our Noble King:
In September, 1745… demonstrations of loyalty to the reigning house were in special demand. Prince, Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, had routed Cope at Prestonpans, and was about to invade England; London was preparing to defend itself and its Hanoverian rulers. An example of popular feeling was given on September 28th when the entire male caste of Drury Lane theatre announced their intention of forming a special unit of the Volunteer Defence Force. That evening they gave a performance of Jonson’s The Alchemist. At its conclusion, there was an additional item. Three of the leading singers of the day—Mrs. Cibber, Beard and Reinhold —stepped forward and began a special anthem:
God bless our Noble King,
God Save great George our King ...
The Daily Advertiser reported: “The universal applause sufficiently denoted in how just an Abhorrence they (the audience) hold the Arbitrary Schemes of our invidious enemies. ...” The other theatres were quick to follow Drury Lane. Charles Dimont, History Today, 1953
The following year, Handel incorporated the theme into his Occasional Oratorio, a response to the Jacobite Rebellion of ’45. In the pubs, loyal Britons made up impromptu lyrics:
Lord, grant that Marshal Wade,
May by thy mighty aid,
Victory bring.
May he sedition hush,
and like a torrent rush,
Rebellious Scots to crush,
God save the King.
The Jacobites, in response, came up with:
God bless the prince, I pray,
God bless the prince, I pray,
Charlie, I mean;
That Scotland we may see
Freed from vile Presbyt’ry,
Both George and his Feckie,
Ever so, Amen.
In the USA, Samuel Francis Smith, a Baptist minister and composer of over 150 hymns, wrote America (My Country ‘tis of thee), in 1832. He had been studying theology in Germany and liked how daily classes began, with students singing a hymn, and thought he’d like to write something like that for Americans. He heard Muzio Clementi’s Symphony No. 3, which contained the melody of God Save The Queen, (as a tribute to the UK, Clementi’s adopted country), and it was in this orchestral context that the tune first caught Smith’s ear. He copied out the melody and thirty minutes later, the classic Americana lyric was written.
Samuel Francis Smith’s version became one of the United States’ de facto national anthems - along with Hail, Columbia and a few others - until Francis Scott Key’s The Star-Spangled Banner was adopted, in 1931.
As had happened in the UK, America (My Country ‘tis of thee), with its extraordinarily memorable tune, underwent many similar lyric ‘cover versions’, in the States, as various groups, such as abolitionists, organized labour and farm unions, the growing women’s suffrage movement, Native Americans, and the Civil Rights movement, all hung their respective political messages on the resilient melody. In the late 1830s, the Temperance League published dozens of lyric variations to the same tune, all sanctioned, remarkably, by the composer, himself, Samuel Francis Smith, who, as well as a minister, had also been an influential temperance activist.
Here at her altar swear
Your country’s ark to tear
From despot’s hand:
Midst drunkard hosts be brave –
Your holy birthright save!
Roll back that Hellish wave
Which sweeps the land.
During the Civil War, in the 1860s, both the Northern and Southern armies adapted it for patriotic purposes, and, in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr incorporated some of the text in the close to his famous I Have a Dream speech:
This will be the day when all of God's children
will be able to sing with a new meaning:
My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrim's pride,
From every mountainside
Let freedom ring!
Recalling the stirring clarion calls of Churchill, a reviewer in the Los Angeles Times wrote about King:
‘… the matchless eloquence [of] a supreme orator… a type so rare as almost to be forgotten in our age..’
God Save the Queen became a pervasive force throughout Europe. It was sung as Ober am jungen Rhein, the National Anthem of Liechtenstein, (the last of the 343 states which once made up the Holy Roman Empire).
Bismark personally chose it for Heil dir im Siegerkranz, and became the anthem of the German Empire, until the end of the First World War.
It was the royal song of Norway (Kongesangen), and also of France, in honor of Louis XIV. Dieu Sauve le Roy, was composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully, as a prayer, during King Louis XIV surgery, on an anal fistula, in 1792!
It was heard in the anthems of Sweden (Bevare Gud vår kung) and Switzerland (Rufst du, mein Vaterland), in all the 54 Commonwealth nations, and in Russia, where it became the National Anthem, from 1816 to 1833, with the title, Molitva russkikh (The Prayer of Russians), with new lyrics, by Vasily Zhukovsky.
GSTQ was the National Anthem of the Kingdom of Hawaii, before 1860, and a Hawaiian language version, E Ola Ke Alii Ke Akua, became the official Anthem, from 1860 to 1886. Hawaii had been a sovereign nation, until 1893, when the monarchy was overthrown, but it remained a republic, until it became a territory of the US, in 1983, and formally achieved Statehood, in 1959. (Note: Hawaii was also only one of two US states - the other being the Republic of Texas - that had had international diplomatic recognition, as a country, before becoming a State).
Many well-known composers have incorporated the melody of God Save the King/Queen, into compositions, including Beethoven, in no less than seven variations, as, in his lifetime, his music was more popular in England, than anywhere else in Europe, besides Germany.
The theme appears in Haydn, Brahms, J. C. Bach, Liszt, Britten, Debussy, Weber, Paganini, Strauss, Elgar and many others.
Abdullah Quilliam, a nineteenth-century convert to Islam, and leading Islamic scholar, in the UK, wrote an Islamic lyric adaptation:
God bless the Muslim cause:
Bless all who keep Thy laws
And do the right.
Uphold the Muslim band,
In this and every land;
Give them full strength to stand
Firm in the fight.
(1st Muharram, 1319, 1901)
GSTQ was one of the first pieces of music played by computer, (along with Baa Baa Black Sheep) and was the first computerized music to ever be recorded, programmed by Alan Turing, at the Computing Machine Laboratory of the University of Manchester, in 1948.
There were originally five verses to God Save the Queen, but the second verse is hardly ever sung:
O Lord our God arise,
Scatter her enemies,
And make them fall:
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix:
God save us all.
By coincidence, the inaugural version of America (My Country ‘tis of thee) also had five verses - the third verse never making it past a single initial performance, in 1831:
No more shall tyrants here
With haughty steps appear,
And solder bands;
No more shall tyrants tread
Above the patriot dead --
No more our blood be shed
By alien hands.
Perhaps it’s time to put the missing verses back in.