National Anthem

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 388, 29 November 1946, Page 11

National Anthem

EGRETFUL as I am at having to| forgo my Travellers’ Tales at 9.30 on Sunday morning from 2YA, I nevertheless feel that Happy and Glorious is almost as good value. This programme aims at giving, in four episodes, the history of the National Anthem, which at first hearing sounds a somewhat liberal allowance. But a little research reveals that "God Save the King" occupies five and a-half pages of Scholes’ Oxford Companion to Music, and since Scholes himself is technical adviser to the producer it would appear that we have been let off lightly. But in the first episode at least the National Anthem has become metely @ peg on which is hung a vivid and authoritative account of the events leading up to the Rebellion of *45 and (secondarily) to the first playing of the National Anthem in more or less its present form at Covent Garden in 1745, in the months following the landing. of the Young Pretender. Verisimilitude is given by actual ex-

tracts from Horace Walpole’s diary, from the Gentleman’s Magazine, and from the speeches of George II and the Bonny Prince; but these extracts are all concerned with the Rebellion and not the Anthem. Doctor Arne gets brief mention, but so far there is no-word of John Bull or Purcell. However, the programme is distinctive in being one of the few accounts of the times written round a Hanoverian and not a Jacobite hero. We may learn in subsequent episodes what there was about George II to inspire the patriotic fervour of the song.