The Austrian Hymn
It was shortly after his return to Vienna—in January 1797, to be precise—that he composed his favourite air, "God preserve the Emperor," better known as the Austrian Hymn. The story of this celebrated composition is worth telling with some minuteness. Its inception was due to Count von Saurau, Imperial High Chancellor and Minister of the Interior. Writing in 1820, the count said:
I often regretted that we had not, like the English, a national air calculated to display to all the world the loyal devotion of our people to the kind and upright ruler of our Fatherland, and to awaken within the hearts of all good Austrians that noble national pride so indispensable to the energetic fulfillment of all the beneficial measures of the sovereign. This seemed to me more urgent at a period when the French Revolution was raging most furiously, and when the Jacobins cherished the idle hope of finding among the worthy Viennese partisans and participators in their criminal designs. [The scandalous Jacobin persecutions and executions in Austria and Hungary took place in 1796]. I caused that meritorious poet Haschka to write the words, and applied to our immortal countryman Haydn to set them to music, for I considered him alone capable of writing anything approaching in merit to the English "God save the King." Such was the origin of our national hymn.
It would not have been difficult to match "God save the King," the mediocrity of which, especially as regards the words, has been the butt of countless satirists. Beethoven wrote in his diary that he "must show the English what a blessing they have" in that "national disgrace." If Haydn regarded it as a "blessing," he certainly did not take it as a model. He produced an air which, looking at it from a purely artistic point of view, is the best thing of the national anthem kind that has ever been written. The Emperor was enchanted with it when sung on his birthday, February 12, 1797, at the National Theatre in Vienna, and through Count Saurau sent the composer a gold box adorned with a facsimile of the royal features. "Such a surprise and such a mark of favour, especially as regards the portrait of my beloved monarch," wrote Haydn, "I never before received in acknowledgment of my poor talents."
Haydn's Love for It
We have several indications of Haydn's predilection for this fine air, which has long been popular as a hymn tune in all the churches. He wrote a set of variations for it as the Andante of his "Kaiser Quartet." Griesinger tells us, too, that as often as the warm weather and his strength permitted, during the last few years of his life, he used to be led into his back room that he might play it on the piano. It is further related by Dies that, during the bombardment of Vienna in May 1809, Haydn seated himself at his instrument every forenoon to give forth the sound of the favourite song. Indeed, on May 26, only five days before his death, he played it over three times in succession, and "with a degree of expression that astonished himself." As one writer puts it, the air "seemed to have acquired a certain sacredness in his eyes in an age when kings were beheaded and their crowns tossed to the rabble."
Haydn's first sketch of the melody was found among his papers after his death. We reproduce it here, with an improvement shown in small notes. There are, it will be observed, some slight differences between the draft and the published version of the air:
[figure: a musical score excerpt from the draft]
[figure: a musical score excerpt from the published version]
The collecting of what Tennyson called "the chips of the workshop" is not as a rule an edifying business, but the evolution of a great national air must always be interesting.