On the night of 25 April 1792, in Strasbourg, a French army engineer named Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle sat up composing a marching song for the war France had just declared on Austria. He called it the "War Song for the Army of the Rhine". Within months it had acquired a different name, because volunteer soldiers from Marseille sang it as they marched into Paris that summer: La Marseillaise. Written in a single night by a moderate royalist who was later nearly guillotined by the revolution his song came to symbolise, it became France's national anthem in 1795 — and set the template for one of the strangest genres in music: songs that entire nations are contractually emotional about.
National anthems feel eternal, but most are improvised, borrowed or accidental. The oldest words belong to Japan's "Kimigayo", a tenth-century poem — also, at five lines, among the shortest anthems in the world — though its melody dates only from the nineteenth century. The oldest music is usually credited to the Dutch "Wilhelmus", written in the sixteenth century, whose fifteen verses form an acrostic: their first letters spell out "Willem van Nassov" (William of Nassau). Britain's "God Save the King", first performed publicly in 1745 amid the Jacobite rising, has a decent claim to be the first true national anthem in function — and became the most plagiarised tune in the genre. Liechtenstein's anthem uses the identical melody to this day, which produces a happy absurdity whenever the two nations meet at football and the same tune is played twice. Switzerland and Prussia also borrowed it for long stretches, and the United States sings "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" to it.
Anthems without words
The most reliable pub-quiz trap in the category: which anthems have no lyrics? Spain's Marcha Real — a military march of eighteenth-century origin — is the famous case. It is not that Spaniards never tried words; Franco-era lyrics were dropped, and a 2007-8 competition to crowdsource new ones collapsed amid ridicule and political allergy. The result is that Spanish athletes hum. San Marino's anthem is likewise wordless, and Bosnia and Herzegovina adopted a lyric-less anthem after its 1990s war precisely because no words could be found that all communities would sing. Kosovo's anthem, pointedly titled "Europe", is also without lyrics for the same diplomatic reason. At the opposite extreme sits Greece: its "Hymn to Liberty" runs to 158 stanzas in the original poem — only the first two are sung — and it does double duty as the anthem of Cyprus — one of the few cases of two states sharing an anthem, alongside the United Kingdom and New Zealand's shared use of "God Save the King".
Anthems get chosen by every route except careful planning. Some are commissioned; many are hijacked poems set to pre-existing tunes. "The Star-Spangled Banner" — words written by Francis Scott Key in 1814 as he watched the British bombard Fort McHenry — is sung to an eighteenth-century London gentlemen's club tune, "To Anacreon in Heaven", and only became the official US anthem in 1931, a fact that reliably wins bar bets. Germany's anthem keeps the Haydn melody but now sings only the third verse of the old text, the first ("Deutschland über alles") having been retired by history. And "La Marseillaise" itself was banned under Napoleon and the restored monarchy before being re-adopted for good in 1879 — anthems, it turns out, can be sacked and rehired like managers.
The sound of a committee crying
Musicologists note that anthems cluster into families: the hymn (Britain and its imitators), the military march (Spain, France), the Latin American operatic epic — Uruguay's anthem, at several minutes in full, is commonly cited as the longest musical setting — and the post-colonial commission, often written to order at independence. What almost none of them are is popular music in any commercial sense; the anthem is the last genre where a tune's job is not to be liked but to be stood up for.
Rouget de Lisle, the man who started the modern genre, died poor in 1836; his remains were later moved to Les Invalides in Paris with full honours. His one-night song has since been quoted by Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, sung on barricades on several continents, and belted out before rugby matches by people unaware it calls for impure blood to water the furrows. Which is the final truth of anthems: nations choose them in a hurry, argue about them forever, and end up defended by whatever their grandparents happened to sing.
Quiz nuggets
- Rouget de Lisle wrote "La Marseillaise" in one night in Strasbourg in April 1792; it was named after volunteers from Marseille.
- Spain's Marcha Real is a famous anthem with no official lyrics; San Marino, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo also have wordless anthems.
- Liechtenstein's anthem shares its melody with "God Save the King".
- Greece's "Hymn to Liberty" has 158 stanzas in its source poem and also serves as the anthem of Cyprus.
- "The Star-Spangled Banner", set to an English club song, only became the official US anthem in 1931.