European soccer's biggest star may be a song
The song does not have a catchy hook, mostly because its lyrics are in three languages.
- Sam Borden, The New York Times
- Updated: September 22, 2013 10:38 AM IST
The song does not have a catchy hook, mostly because its lyrics are in three languages.
The song is not particularly original, mostly because it was inspired by a piece that was written nearly 300 years ago and was intended for use at the coronation of a king known for having numerous mistresses and an ill-tempered personality.
The song has never spent a day on Billboard's Top 100 (or any other chart, for that matter), mostly because it is not available for purchase or download and has never been a part of the rotation on any significant radio station.
Still, the Champions League anthem - officially titled "Champions League" but known to many as that song that is always on during important European soccer television broadcasts - will be played at a final for the 21st time this weekend. Two decades after its introduction, it remains one of the best-known sports songs in the world.
So although there will be plenty of stars on the field at Wembley Stadium on Saturday - top players like Arjen Robben and Bastian Schweinsteiger and Robert Lewandowski - for the millions of fans watching around the world, the most recognizable feature of the match between Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund may be the music.
That is not a slight on either team. After all, the anthem is everywhere. Fans have made videos of themselves playing the song, and one even attempted it (with remarkable clarity) on a vuvuzela. A bride in Spain surprised her groom by eschewing a wedding classic like Pachelbel's Canon and having the choir break into the anthem instead. (The groom stood and bowed at the end.)
"I have to say it's all a total surprise to me how long it has lasted and how popular it has become," Tony Britten, the anthem's composer, said in an interview. "To be honest, when I got the job to do it, it was just another job to me. The whole thing from start to finish took maybe a month or so."
Britten composed the anthem in 1992 after being suggested for the job by his agent, who had a connection to the marketing company that European soccer's governing body had hired to help brand its annual elite tournament.
Craig Thompson, a former managing director at the marketing company, TEAM, said there was a negative perception of European soccer at the time - "there had been a lot of hooligan incidents, fan disasters and all that," he said - so the aim in creating the Champions League was to "class it up."
"We knew we wanted to use music, and everyone thought we should use Queen's 'We Are the Champions,' but we really wanted something classical," Thompson added.
Britten, who was working in film and television and writing commercial jingles, said he sent half a dozen snippets of classical pieces to the marketing executives to see what appealed to them. He was not surprised something operatic was chosen, he said, because the Three Tenors - Pl~CHECK~cido Domingo, Jose Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti - were touring together and were popular at the time.
"But they also told me, 'We don't want just solos; we want something with a choir,'" Britten said. "So that's what I did."
The selection that TEAM asked Britten to work off was "Zadok the Priest," one of four anthems written by Handel for the coronation of George II of Britain in 1727. Britten seized upon the rising string phase in the piece, infused it into his own composition and, in his words, "just got busy with it."
For lyrics, he had been instructed to incorporate English, French and German - the official languages of UEFA, European soccer's governing body - so he began by writing down a long list of superlatives and translating the words into the other languages to see which might work well together.
The chorus, which even casual fans may recognize because it is played continually on broadcasts of every Champions League game, is unforgettable: "The champions!" the choir sings, as if paying homage to some sort of heavenly body wearing shinguards.
There was a moment or two, however, in which "the champions" could have been something else. Britten said that other possibilities included "the greatest," "the finest," "the most exciting" and, in what he conceded was probably a stretch, "the most significant."
"In retrospect, some of those would have been a disaster," he said.
Thankfully, he settled on "the champions" as the featured line and interspersed lyrics in the other two languages, like "eine gro~CHECK~e sportliche Veranstaltung" ("a major sporting event") and "ce sont les meilleures equipes" ("these are the best teams"). Britten recorded the original track at Angel Studios in Islington, London, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields chorus.
The anthem made its debut at Champions League matches in the fall of 1992 and was featured at the league's first final, in the spring of 1993.
Musically, it is not a piece that overwhelms. Steve Smith, the music editor at Time Out New York and a classical music critic, said his initial reaction upon hearing the anthem was that it was "bleeding Handel" and that he "could barely tell the difference" between Handel's piece and Britten's.
Britten believes there are significant differences, although he acknowledged that the anthem "was not necessarily a piece of art."
"I wasn't trying to pretend to make a piece of art," he added. "I was concerned that it did what it was designed to do."
On that score, Britten seems to have succeeded. The song is undeniably connected with the Champions League (Thompson said one study by his company showed that 98 percent of Europeans surveyed could identify the anthem), and from the standpoint of providing gravity to the Champions League games, the song appears to arouse from players, coaches and fans a general sentiment of respect and appreciation.
Unlike songs used mainly for television broadcasts - such as Leo Arnaud's "Bugler's Dream," the familiar Olympic song used by ABC and NBC - the Champions League anthem is played in the stadium just before each match. Players can often be seen with wide eyes or shaking shoulders during the anthem as they nervously anticipate the start of the game. Gianluigi Buffon, an Italian goalkeeper, once acknowledged that when Juventus spent two seasons out of the Champions League, the anthem was part of what he missed.
"I used to hear it from my sofa," he said in September. "I used to think it wasn't fair."
Britten, too, has enjoyed hearing the anthem on the field before matches, and he has conducted live versions of it on occasion, including a memorable day at the San Siro stadium in Milan for the 2001 final, when he led the famed La Scala opera house choir.
On Saturday, however, Britten will not be at Wembley. He is doing publicity for a film he has coming out this weekend, and he plans to watch the match on television. He said, too, that he felt no particular obligation to watch the playing of the anthem because, as he put it, "I know how it sounds."
He added: "That's often a good time for me to run to the bathroom. I know exactly how long the song goes."
© 2013, The New York Times News Service