Antony Hegarty, avant-garde hero

Talking gender, music and global warming with an introspective Antony Hegarty, of Antony and the Johnsons

Six of the best: Musical monarchs

When I was 20, on the threshold of my academic career, I experienced a revelation. I was listening to a performance of Handel’s Messiah at King’s College, Cambridge. The great chapel, with its walls covered in crowns and coats of arms, is a shrine to monarchy. I suddenly realised that the words of the Hallelujah chorus — “king of kings, lord of lords!” — and its magnificent, thunderous rhythms, were also as much about monarchy as Christianity. They were celebrating Handel’s royal patron on Earth (George II, when Messiah was written) as much as the heavenly ruler.

I’ve spent much of the past year exploring the relationship between music and monarchy, for a BBC Two series. Over six centuries, successive kings and queens have shaped the history of British music, as patrons and tastemakers — and even as composers and performers. Music has taken me to the most intimate, personal aspects of royal lives; as well as revealing the most public, grand and ceremonious face of monarchy. I’ve heard music written for coronations and funerals, peace treaties and worship, jubilees and birthday gifts.

Across the centuries, many royals have been accomplished musicians. Charles I played the viol to a professional standard; the 18th-century Frederick, Prince of Wales, played the cello (as did the current holder of that title, in his youth); and Queen Victoria’s singing voice won praise from Felix Mendelssohn. The monarch’s personal choir, the Chapel Royal, was for centuries one of the most famed in Europe. Institutions such as Eton and King’s College, to the Royal Opera House and Royal College of Music, owe their existence in part to the musical passions of particular monarchs. And the monarchy played a pivotal role in the careers of our greatest composers — among them Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, Henry Purcell, George Frideric Handel, Hubert Parry, Edward Elgar and William Walton — all of whom are still heard today, not least at the great royal occasions that the nation still enjoys.
David Starkey’s Music and Monarchy begins tonight on BBC Two. The accompanying book is published by BBC Books