Republic or Death! (23 page)

Which is all a rather long way of telling you why I couldn't have been happier the day I realised I could tell the story of ‘God Save the Queen' without going on any sort of personal journey at all. I just needed to go to the world's seventh-smallest country and get an audience with a prince.

*

It's almost midday on 15 August, and I'm standing halfway up a mountain in Liechtenstein. The sun is glaring off the river below and the snow above, but I can still make out the entirety of the one-valley country beneath me. It's a surprisingly unkempt mix of industrial estates and wheat fields, Alpine villas and office blocks with more nameplates on their front doors than strictly seems legitimate (some 46,000 businesses are registered here due to the country's relaxed tax regime), but it's bewitching all the same. It's National Day and surrounding me in this meadow are a good 3,000 Liechtensteiners. Some are in traditional dress – women in maids' outfits with intricately stitched halos for hats, men in thick multicoloured tunics straight out of the age of empires – while others look as if they've stumbled here by accident, greasy hair plastered to their faces and last night's drink sweating out of them. But everyone is singing. Even the man right at the front: Hans-Adam II, a silver-haired, ever-grinning billionaire and the fifteenth reigning prince from and of Liechtenstein.

‘
Oben am jungen Rhein
/
Lehnet sich Liechtenstein
, /
An Alpenhöh'n
,' they sing. Up above the young Rhine, Liechtenstein is resting, on Alpine heights. ‘
Dies liebe Heimatland
, /
Das teure Vaterland
/
Hat Gottes weise Hand
/
Für uns erseh'n
,' they go on, praising this beloved homeland and this dear fatherland, that's been chosen for them by God's wise hand. And as each word comes out, my smile gets wider, because here, some 700 miles from home, I'm hearing a tune that could not be more familiar. The melody is unmistakable. Maybe slightly quicker than I am used to, but there is not one note's difference. We rush into a second verse and some in the crowd start doing hand actions to accompany the words. When they hit the word ‘prince', they shoot their right arm out straight, before drawing it back just as quickly, a look of embarrassment on their faces. They do it again for the word ‘fatherland', like the most apologetic Nazi salute you could ever witness. It is without doubt the best version of ‘God Save the Queen' I have ever heard.

Five minutes after the final words – ‘
Vereint und frei
', united and free – die out, I find myself talking to Baron Eduard von Falz-Fein, a 102-year-old who I've been reliably informed is the soul of Liechtenstein. He was born in tsarist Russia, but had to flee due to the Revolution. After a period stateless, travelling on a Nansen passport, he ended up representing Liechtenstein at the Olympics and later even redesigned the country's flag when he realised it was the same as Haiti's (he added a crown). He's also the main reason anyone has ever visited this country, having almost single-handedly developed its tourist industry by convincing bus companies they could make a six-country tour of Europe into a seven-country one just by driving an extra twenty minutes across the Austrian border. He asked them to stop at his tourist shop and soon became extremely wealthy. I tell him what I've just witnessed.

‘What do you mean, it's your anthem?' he says, prodding a finger in my direction from his perch on a windowsill where he now spends his days (he hasn't been able to walk for two years). ‘I have looked it up on the internet and it says that in 1757 Joseph Haydn composed the melody for Austria. Then it went to Germany. Then to here. And then to you. One hundred per cent what I am telling you is true! And you say that's wrong; that it's your anthem. Don't English people know their history? Incredible!'

I try telling him you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet, but after another bout of finger-pointing it seems like a good idea to move the conversation on to safer ground, so I ask how a Russian émigré came to live here. He runs through his entire life story, focusing more on his days reporting as a cycling journalist in France and his past as a Casanova than on his escape from Russia (‘I had a lot of girls in my life. Now it's gone – since years – finished!'). But the simple answer turns out to be that when he visited here for the first time and saw the mountains and the flowers spilling out of the fields, he realised he didn't need anything else. I ask if he found it hard to adjust to life in such a small country given that he was such a ladies' man. ‘I never touched a girl from Liechtenstein!' he says, offended by the idea. ‘This country is too small! Girls are very jealous! It would have been impossible! All my
conquêtes
have been abroad.'

But talking about girls does seem to put him in a better mood, so I decide it's safe to move back to the anthem. He tells me about the time he went to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, watched a British medal ceremony and heard his new home's anthem suddenly playing. ‘It was the same as ours. I did not understand what was happening!' he shouts. A couple of decades after that, he says, he went to a bobsleigh world championships and the organisers played a novelty pop song he had helped write called the ‘Liechtenstein Polka' because they thought the real anthem couldn't have the same tune as ‘God Save the Queen'. And about twenty years after that, he appeared on American TV after a Liechtenstein skier, Hanni Wenzel, won gold at the Olympics. He was asked what Liechtenstein's anthem sounded like. ‘I told them it was the same as Britain's and everyone found it so funny. I became a hit just for saying it!'

The more the baron talks about the anthem, the more it seems to dawn on him that maybe it is strange that Liechtenstein has the same tune as the United Kingdom after all, that perhaps they should have changed the music by now. ‘People say Liechtenstein has no composers, but we had one: Rheinberger,' he says at one point, referring to an organist who died back in 1901. ‘We should have asked him to write something.' But even that realisation doesn't seem to make him think I'm right about the song's origins. ‘Are you sure we didn't have it before you?' he asks as I'm about to leave. ‘Have you looked at the internet?'

Liechtenstein is, despite what the baron says, the only country outside the United Kingdom's influence that still uses the melody to ‘God Save the Queen' for its anthem. That melody once meant ‘anthem' to the world, with everyone from Russia to Denmark using it. But all those countries soon realised they might actually be able to conjure a tune for themselves; that perhaps a Russian or Danish song might mean more to the people than a British hymn, that one might even help turn those people into Russians and Danes by making them feel an attachment to something bigger than their village or feudal lord. Some countries dragged their feet, of course. Switzerland did not replace its ‘God Save the Queen'-stealing ‘When You Call, My Fatherland' until 1961, while Australia did not drop it until 1984 and a referendum on the issue (the equally lethargic ‘Advance Australia Fair' was chosen after winning 43 per cent of the vote, ‘God Save the Queen' dropping in status to the royal anthem as it had long been for most of the Commonwealth). But no matter how many other countries have got rid of that melody, Liechtenstein has clung to it so tightly it makes you start to wonder if it actually has any musicians to write a tune of its own, Rheinberger or not.

Liechtensteiners would say it's unfair to criticise them for the lack of originality. For example, Cyprus and Greece share the same anthem, ‘Hymn to Liberty', even if Turkish Cypriots refuse to recognise it (more for political than musical reasons, obviously). Estonia, meanwhile, stole the tune of its anthem from Finland's ‘Maamme' (‘Our Land'), and Fredrik Pacius, the composer of both, had in turn apparently just ripped off a German drinking song. The music for Poland's sprightly if worryingly named ‘Poland is Not Yet Lost' (Poles know it instead as ‘D
ą
browski's Mazurka') was ‘borrowed' by both Yugoslavia and later Serbia and Montenegro before they fell apart. There's also South Korea and the Maldives, both of which originally used the music to ‘Auld Lang Syne' for their anthems until, I assume, one of their diplomats went to Edinburgh for a New Year's Eve and decided perhaps it wasn't the best idea.

There are also an almost endless number of composers who have ‘taken inspiration' from ‘La Marseillaise' when writing anthems. The worst offender is perhaps Enric Bons, a priest who wrote Andorra's anthem, ‘El Gran Carlemany'. He came up with a melody so similar to ‘La Marseillaise' you can only assume he was actually trying to remix it rather than write his own composition, although perhaps he can be slightly forgiven since his country sits right next to France. Less forgivable is James Frederick Mills, a British naval bandleader who wrote Oman's anthem in the 1930s. For thirty seconds, his tune is an original work, a gentle military fanfare any sultan would be pleased to have as his anthem. But then, out of nowhere, he jumps straight into the opening phrase of ‘La Marseillaise'. There's no denying the similarity. He tweaks a note or two, of course, but it's too little to hide the resemblance – the compositional equivalent of an incompetent burglar shutting the door of the house he's just robbed in the hope no one will notice.

But as bad as all those examples are, none of them come close to Liechtenstein's aping of the world's most important anthem with ‘Oben am Jungen Rhein'. It's not like size is an excuse. The six countries smaller than Liechtenstein all have their own anthems (Monaco's even makes a virtue of its size, containing the lines, ‘There are not very many of us, / But we strive to defend our traditions'). So too do many of the world's dependencies. Even the Pitcairn Islands – where the mutineers of the
Bounty
landed and whose population totals a staggering fifty – have managed several unofficial ‘anthems' over the years, although most of them do sound like they were dreamed up by a cruise ship's marketing department. ‘We from Pitcairn Island, we welcome you today,' goes one. ‘We're glad you come to see us, but soon you'll sail away.'

*

If there's one person who can explain why Liechtenstein's never changed its anthem's melody, it's the man sitting before me, Josef Frommelt. Rapidly approaching eighty, he looks as if he should be spending his days painting watercolours in his garden or ruffling the hair of smiling grandchildren, but he's still hard at work; he is both Liechtenstein's main cultural historian and its ‘princely music director', a grand title that means he's given occasional tasks such as producing an official arrangement of ‘Oben am Jungen Rhein' so that people sing it at the same speed and in the same key (apparently once a huge problem). I've arranged to meet him at a cafe in the centre of Vaduz, Liechtenstein's miniature capital, to talk through the song's history, although right now it's proving somewhat hard to get him to do anything except reminisce about his childhood. ‘There were punches and kicks, bloody noses, black eyes and, er … How do you say when your skin goes purple? Yes, bruises! Everywhere!' he laughs, swinging his arms across the table, re-enacting the fight like a schoolboy boasting to his friends. ‘And all because of the anthem! So you could say we fought to have your tune.'

I'm lost, I feel the need to admit, and he apologises for getting ahead of himself. ‘Our anthem was actually first called “Oben am Deutschen Rhein” – “Up above the German Rhine”,' he says, ‘because we were part of the German Confederation when it was written. And in the 1930s we had a very strong group of Nazis here. I was a small boy then, of perhaps three or four years, but I remember every Saturday afternoon near my father's house, the
Hitlerjugend
would make the marching parades in the brown uniforms with the Nazi banners and the Nazi flag and so on, and they'd sing these Hitler songs. Then they would sing the anthem and shout every mention of the word “Germany” as if they wanted us to be part of the Third Reich. Then the Scouts would sing it back at them, but change the words so there was no mention of Germany. And then there'd be a big fight!' He starts swinging his arms again. ‘It was very exciting for me. And in the end the Scouts won.' So when did Liechtenstein officially remove those German references? ‘1963,' he says. ‘Change can be a bit slow here sometimes.'

I start to ask about why Liechtenstein has never changed the music if it felt happy to change some words, but he cuts me off. ‘Before we talk about my anthem, you should really know the full story of “God Save the Queen”. It's rather long. How many nights are you staying here?'

*

On 28 September 1745, Thomas Arne, the thirty-five-year-old Roman-nosed musical director of His Majesty's Company of Comedians in London and the famed composer of ‘Rule, Britannia!', found himself urgently in need of a patriotic crowd-pleaser. His city was about to be ruined, everyone around him was saying. Charles Edward Stuart – Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender to the British throne – had recently landed in Scotland and raised an army of Highlanders. There were only a few thousand of them, apparently, but they had managed to rout King George II's men near Edinburgh and had now entered England. The Jacobites were coming, determined to take back the crown they'd lost sixty years earlier.

Arne's colleagues in the company seemed to be among the most moved by the threat. That morning they had put an advert in the
General Advertiser
saying the company was ‘to raise 200 men in defence of His Majesty's person and government … The whole company of players are willing to engage.' It's impossible to know if Thomas shared their enthusiasm. He was a staunch Catholic despite the problems admitting that caused at the time – he never wrote music for the Church of England – and his mother was even more of one (the only contemporary description of her says she was a ‘bigoted Catholic'). He might, then, have been quite happy for a Catholic Stuart king to retake the throne. But he also knew his job: he'd suddenly found himself in ‘the most pious, as well as the most loyal place in the three kingdoms' (of England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland), and his music that night needed to show that. There's no record of what he did that afternoon. I like to think he headed out of the Drury Lane Theatre and into Covent Garden's streets, hoping the air would help him think of a song – the perfect song – to end that night's performance and sum up the city's mood, swerving around hawkers and dodging carriages while humming to himself. But equally he could have just searched through his songbooks until he grabbed one called the
Thesaurus Musicus
that had been published the year before, and saw the perfect choice sitting there on page 22, a simple tune ‘for two voices' that had somehow been forgotten.