Anthem - Intellect

Anthem
King points at a clear homology between the televised images and the musical jingle:
‘Music and colours merge together as one dense signifier, communicating a concept
of silver in both sound and vision.’ 429
Handel’s music involves a series of lesser chords symbolizing a diverse
subject population below the monarch but, at its climax, the music
reconciles these lower chords into a single major key fanfare; a sovereign
nation is unified beneath a supreme monarch. The Champions League
Anthem communicates the same message of diverse subordinate
elements unified beneath a sovereign body; the clubs are represented
by the lower chords which are brought together in a majestic union
under UEFA. 430
A couple of Zadok clips on YouTube have attracted a lot of discussion where royalists
and football fans join in expressing their love for Händel’s music, even though the two
groups sometimes clash, as when ‘bulked’ exclaims: ‘its been reduced to as lowly and
classless as a football anthem’. ‘PremiumUnleaded’ jokingly finds it ‘appropriate that
the first part of a piece for a coronation forms the basis for the theme of the world’s
most prestigious annual sporting competition’. But otherwise the discussion is more
about monarchy and democracy than about the tune itself or its use by UEFA.
Figure 7.5 The Marc-Antoine Charpentier theme used as anthem for the European Broadcasting
Union EBU and its Eurovision.
Whereas UEFA has anthem of the solemn hymn type, the televisual EBU has
favoured a march (Figure 7.5). The Council of Europe radio broadcasts used excerpts
from Georg Friedrich Händel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks and the Water Music,
but the EBU for its Eurovision transmissions instead selected a jingle consisting of the
instrumental ‘Prélude’ to the grand motet Te Deum in D major (op. 146), composed
in Paris in the early 1690s by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643–1704). 431 In 1953, the
French-Belgian musicologist Carl de Nys rediscovered this Te Deum, whose opening
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