Our discordant anthem
FROM TALK RADIO to the president, agitated Americans have expressed anger over the "desecration" of "The Star-Spangled Banner" -- a new version sung in Spanish. But the anthem, for more than a century, has been cheapened, insulted and even besmirched by well-intentioned but misguided Americans who think they can improve on it. Such conduct -- except when it touches the immigration question -- is now generally ignored. The current flap is just another opportunity to bash immigrants who happen to be from the "wrong" countries.
Although President Bush argues that the anthem should only be sung in English, performing it in a foreign language isn't novel. Wikipedia links to reports that German and Latin translations appeared in the 1860s, followed by a Yiddish version. The U.S. Bureau of Education printed it in Spanish in 1919. In those more idyllic days, immigrants demonstrated their love for their new home by joyfully singing the anthem in their native tongue. You can find it in Spanish on the current State Department website.
Other versions left the words alone but altered the melody, in one case so drastically that it got the arranger-conductor in trouble. When Igor Stravinsky raised his baton in Boston in 1944 to conduct the anthem, a dutiful audience began to sing but, according to one report, as the strange and dissonant notes continued, "eyebrows lifted, voices fluttered and the singing stopped." Boston authorities warned Stravinsky that he was in violation of a state law that forbade rearrangement of the anthem. Music critic Albert Goldberg noted that Stravinsky's version was banned in Boston and booed in Baltimore, but the composer escaped sanctions.
But not Karl Muck, who also conducted in Boston. His sin was not that he wrote a discordant arrangement. It was that he didn't play it at all. During World War I, the German native allegedly refused to lead the orchestra in a rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Muck claimed that the piece was left off the program because musically it was not in accord with the serious compositions scheduled. The popular feeling was that he was pro-German. Arrest and deportation followed.
