The Daily Telegraph - Features
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s populist anthem hit the mark
The composer’s showmanship and love of the sacred combined to great effect, says Serena Davies
Of all the new commissions for the Coronation, the one that came with most fanfare, both literal and metaphorical, was Lord LloydWebber’s new anthem Make a Joyful Noise. When Lloyd Webber gave an early preview of it to the King, with whom he shares a love of choral music and architecture, the composer has said it reduced our new monarch to tears and gave him goosebumps.
That was when Lloyd Webber simply knocked out the tune on a piano during a private meeting. One wonders what the King was feeling when he heard it in all its glory – trumpets, cymbals and drumrolls included. He certainly gave one of the few quiet smiles he allowed himself during this most solemn of ceremonies. It arrived, after all, just after the coronation of his wife, the Queen.
The anthem is set largely to the words of the joyfully celebratory Psalm 98 – O Sing Unto the Lord a New Song, with a little reordering. Lloyd Webber told the Telegraph that its emphasis on “the Lord” is there to remind us that the King sees himself as a servant of God. “Something that Charles wants us to understand is that he doesn’t want people to think he’s the ‘lord’ – he’s King, but he has a responsibility to something higher.”
The piece was heard for the first time during the Coronation and the live recording of it has been released as a single to raise money for Age UK and the Royal British Legion.
The King, who personally asked Lloyd Webber to create the piece, wanted it to be “hummable”, a challenge that the composer of such earworms as Don’t Cry for Me Argentina and Memory didn’t struggle with. After the triumphalism of the opening trumpet fanfare and the mature male voices we first hear, it was the angelic sound of the choirboys as they came in with, “He hath remembered his mercy and his truth...” that brought the emotion and offered its sweetest melody.
Lloyd Webber is a master of accessible theatricality and this piece is a fine example of the intelligent populism that he has made his signature. The anthem communicates a childish wonder, which conjures the image of Lloyd Webber himself as a small boy sitting in the Abbey, as he did many times as a pupil of Westminster Under School, awed by this building that he has called the greatest gothic architecture in the world.
Lloyd Webber has a love of the numinous. After the cascade of catchy notes that accompany the main refrain there comes a more mystical passage that reaches towards the sublime. You could sense here a nostalgia for the
This is a fine example of the intelligent populism that he has made his signature
mid-20th-century flowering of English music led by William Walton and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Nevertheless, the end of the piece feels very much like Lloyd Webber the showman, with a flourish that is strangely reminiscent of Love Changes Everything, from his 1989 musical Aspects of Love.
“Some melodies take forever, you agonise and agonise. This one came very quickly,” Lloyd Webber has said. “It wrote itself, in a morning before Christmas. Once I found the text, it was easy.” It is hard to imagine much has been easy in this intricately planned day, but this crowd-pleaser hit its mark without difficulty.
‘Make a Joyful Noise’ is out now on Decca