1972 Friedrich Schiller’s lyric poem, An die Freude (usually translated as ‘Ode to Joy’), was written in 1785. German Romanticism theorised itself earlier than its English counterpart and the ‘Ode to Joy’ celebrated what would be an important idea in the movement internationally (see, for example, Wordsworth’s fine sonnet ‘Surprised by Joy’). An die Freude, however, simply does not translate into English as anything other than high-sounding doggerel, viz:
Tochter aus Elysium
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum.
Daughter of Elysium
We enter, fire-imbibed,
Heavenly, thy sanctuary.
Octosyllabics rarely work in English poetry. Nor do the compounds (‘fire-imbibed’!) which come naturally to an agglutinative language like German.
Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ would have seemed destined to remain locked in its original German, but for the fact that, 40 years later, Beethoven made it the grand finale to his Ninth Symphony. As such it became the most famous Romantic poem in the world.
In recognition of the poem’s universality, and its supra-national abstractness (none of those worrying chauvinisms to be found in ‘God Save the Queen’, the Marseillaise or – most horribly – ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles’), the Ode to Joy, as set to music by Beethoven, was adopted by the Council of Europe as the European Community’s anthem from 20 January 1972 onwards. The EU, as it would become, was officially joyful.
The dignity of the anthem was, however, somewhat tarnished when, in 1974, the rebel state of Rhodesia – having unilaterally declared independence and white supremacy – ran a contest for a new national anthem. The winner was Mary Bloom, a South African, with a defiant lyric set to Beethoven’s chorale:
Rise O voices of Rhodesia,
God may we thy bounty share,
Give us strength to face all danger,
And where challenge is, to dare.
For the Labour UK government of the time – desperate to end the Rhodesian crisis – it was deeply embarrassing as Europeans, albeit reluctant Europeans, to stand to attention in Brussels or Strasbourg to what was the battle-song of those disloyal white settlers (‘kith and kin’, as they called themselves). No joy in that.