1. As Napoleon’s troops threatened Vienna, Graf von Sarau commissioned an Austrian National Anthem to rival the ‘Marseillaise’ that was inspiring the French troops. Lorenz Leopold Haschka, a Professor of Theology, was entrusted with the task and Haydn wrote the music, which received its first performance on 12 February 1797 at the Hoftheater, during the first interval in Dittersdorf’s Doktor und Apotheker. ‘Gott, erhalte Franz den Kaiser’ was sung as the Emperor entered his box, after which the entire audience, who had received copies of it in advance, reprised it with enormous enthusiasm – to the visible discomfort of Kaiser Franz, who hated such demonstrations. It was not until 1805 that the melody was used as a hymn tune in England. It was later chosen as the tune for the German national anthem to accompany Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s poem ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles’, written in 1841. The Weimar Republic adopted it as the National Anthem in 1922, and the Nazis played it alongside their party anthem. Fallersleben’s first verse was eventually banned because of its supremacist connotations, and since 1952 the anthem has been sung only to the verse beginning ‘Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit’. Kaiser Wilhelm II was allegedly nonplussed when he heard his godmother, Queen Victoria, singing the melody at Windsor Castle to the words of Newton’s hymn. Haydn used the famous melody in the poco adagio second movement of his String Quartet in C, Op. 76/3, the so-called ‘Emperor’ Quartet.

2. A few hymn books have changed the first line of the final verse to: ‘Saviour, since of Zion’s city’ – thus altering the meaning.