Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser

The story

The song was written in 1797, when Austria was gravely threatened by Revolutionary France. According to an account written in 1847 by Anton Schmid, custodian of the Austrian National Library, Joseph Haydn had come to know "God Save the King" in England and wished that Austria had a song like it to honour its sovereign. Count Franz von Saurau, President of Lower Austria, took up the idea: as he later wrote, he had a text made by the poet Lorenz Leopold Haschka and turned to Haydn as the one composer who could write something to stand beside the British anthem. The song was also meant to rouse Austrians to volunteer for the war against France.

"Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser" was first performed on the birthday of Emperor Francis II, 12 February 1797, at the Burgtheater in Vienna, with the emperor present for his 29th birthday. Printed copies were sent to theatres and opera houses across the Austrian lands with instructions for performance. It proved popular and came to serve, unofficially, as Austria's first national anthem. Haydn's sketches show how he pruned the melody to reach its climax; whether he drew on folk song, or folk singers later took up his tune, is still debated.

Haydn wrote three more versions: one for orchestra, a set of variations as the slow movement of his String Quartet Op. 76 No. 3, the "Emperor" quartet commissioned by Count Joseph Erdödy, and a piano arrangement of that movement published in 1799. In his last, frail years he often played the song at the piano for consolation. His servant Johann Elssler recorded that he played it three times over on 26 May 1809, the last music he played; he died on 31 May.

The tune remained the anthem of the Habsburg emperors with changing words. After Francis died in 1835 new words praised his successor Ferdinand; after Ferdinand's abdication in 1848 the original words returned, since the new emperor was also named Francis; in 1854 new words were adopted for emperor and country. There were versions in Czech, Croatian, Slovene, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Polish, Italian and other languages of the empire. Other composers quoted the melody as an emblem of Austria and its monarchy: Beethoven in a work celebrating the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Rossini, Paganini, Donizetti, Clara Schumann, Smetana and Bruckner, while Bartók used it in his symphonic poem Kossuth (1903) as the sign of the Austrian enemy of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848.

When Austria-Hungary was dissolved in 1918, the new Austrian Republic set the tune aside, and in 1920 the government moved to replace it. It returned in 1929 with entirely new words as the anthem of Austria until the Anschluss of 1938. With its older words it kept its link to the Habsburgs: the first stanza of the 1854 version was sung at the funerals of Empress Zita in 1989 and of her son Otto von Habsburg in 2011. In 1841 Hoffmann von Fallersleben wrote "Das Lied der Deutschen" to Haydn's melody, and its third stanza is today the national anthem of Germany. In English hymnals the tune is known as "Austria" or "Austrian Hymn", most often with John Newton's "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken".

What it says

A prayer that God preserve Emperor Francis and his rule, written as Austria's answer to "God Save the King" in wartime. The mood is calm and dignified; Haydn's broad melody gives it the character of a hymn rather than a march.

The words