Republic or Death! (2 page)

More likely, it was because if you weren't from the Netherlands the song was incredibly dull. Kings and queens in other countries would have heard it, nodded off halfway through and then forgotten to ask why it had achieved so much. The world wouldn't hear another national anthem until Britain's ‘God Save the King' arrived almost 200 years later, and that came about for almost the exact opposite reason to ‘Het Wilhelmus'.

In 1745, George II ruled Britain, but he was known more for his mistresses than for his grip on power, and was facing a crisis: the old Catholic royal family were trying to reclaim the throne, and much of the army who could have stopped them were out of the country. Charles Edward Stuart – Bonnie Prince Charlie, to give him his nickname – landed in Scotland that July with only seven men, but soon convinced thousands of Scots to march with him on London. The French told him they'd provide any support he needed. So what did George do? He didn't seem to panic and immediately call all his soldiers home. Instead he partly took confidence in a song that had sprung up in London and was spreading across the country; one that could help win the war for him. It was a song so simple it reminded everyone who heard it of why they were meant to love him, and it made them think twice before joining the Jacobite army passing through their towns. That song was ‘God Save the King'. ‘God save our gracious King! / Long live our noble King!' it goes:

Scatter his enemies,

and make them fall.

It struck such a chord it was soon being sung to end performances in theatres in every city, then encored in the nearest pub afterwards. It unified, and it gave confidence – the assumption is that it even motivated soldiers in the fight. The fact Bonnie Prince Charlie's army was also singing it, wanting him ‘Long to reign over' Britain instead, apparently didn't matter.

Bonnie Prince Charlie got as far south as Derby, 130 miles from London, before deciding to retreat, realising he didn't have any support further south (his army was eventually defeated at Culloden, near Inverness, and he was forced to flee). George II died of a heart attack fifteen years later while sitting on the toilet. He'd just drunk a cup of hot chocolate. He was, at that point, Britain's longest-ruling king.

‘God Save the King' changed the world's relationship with music. That isn't an overstatement. Here was a short, simple song that increased a king's popularity, helped stop an army and helped make everyone in Britain – well, England at least – feel a bit more united. They were no longer Londoners, villagers or serfs under a lord. They were the king's subjects and they could conquer all.

It kept on being sung long after the Jacobite threat had disappeared, and every other king in Europe quickly paid attention to it. ‘Why haven't I got a song?' you can imagine Tsar Alexander of Russia thinking. ‘Where's my bloody tune?' Frederick V of Denmark might have complained. And so they took ‘God Save the King', changed the words to suit themselves, then built nations off the back of it – using these songs to help define borders as much as to foster love for themselves.

As nations emerged over the coming century, anthems became one of the main things that explained to people who they belonged to, what their characters were, what they were meant to strive for, even what language they were meant to speak. The other symbols of nationhood – flags and crests – couldn't do that. These songs brought people together, even if, in the case of the Netherlands, it was only in wondering why they were pledging loyalty to the King of Spain.

By the end of the 1800s, having an anthem had become so natural that even independence movements made sure they had ones ready and waiting. Anthems soon became an everyday part of diplomacy, played whenever a dignitary arrived in a capital. They also became an everyday part of education, taught in schools. And then, just to make sure no one could do without them, they became an essential part of sports. In 1905, a Welsh rugby crowd sang ‘Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau', the graceful ‘Land of My Fathers', in response to New Zealand's haka, the intimidating war dance performed before matches. It was apparently the first time an anthem had been sung at the start of an international sporting event and the practice soon caught on. In 1921, the International Olympic Committee decided anthems would be played to celebrate every gold medal. From then on, a country literally couldn't go without one of these songs. But, of course, like everything connected with nationalism, as soon as they were penned they were politicised and they became as divisive as they are unifying, and as controversial as they are everyday.

*

‘Of course people don't like my anthem,' says Mendi, the most important man in Kosovo. ‘It doesn't have any words!'

We're sitting in a restaurant in Priština with a sun-drenched veranda and minimalist black and white paint splattered everywhere. It's not long after I've arrived in the city and it feels as if we could be anywhere from Milan to London. The only way I know we're in Priština is that when Mendi ordered us breakfast – a stuffed pancake – he spent five minutes quizzing the waiter about whether the meat was fresh.

‘How can you like any anthem if it doesn't have words?' he says, driving his point home. ‘How can you sing it at a football match? La, la, la, la, la? That'd be silly! How can it be emotional? People hear it and are confused. They don't know if it's good or not, they just know it's not good that it doesn't have words.'

‘Why doesn't it?' I ask and Mendi sighs.

‘If we put words to it the Serbs would object, or the United Nations would object. This is where the war has left us.'

The war. It doesn't take long for it to come up in a conversation here, even when everyone says they want to leave it behind. The night before, I was chatting to an architect in a bar and he joked, ‘So you're here to see a war zone? You're fifteen years late.' I laughed, of course, but the war is actually the reason I decided to start exploring anthems in Kosovo rather than any other country. How can a song mean anything in a place that's so divided, in a country that, due to its separatist origins, isn't recognised by China, Russia or Spain?

The Kosovo War only officially lasted for a year and a half in the late nineties, when Serbian forces tried to force a large proportion of the 1.8 million or so Albanians who then lived here, and who made up around 90 per cent of the population, out of their homes and preferably the country (it was then part of Serbia). The Serbs burned houses, shot families and directed thousands of people to the nearest border.

The Kosovan Albanians – who some argue started the conflict by carrying out attacks against Serbs earlier in the decade, having become fed up with repression – fought a guerrilla war in defence, but the conflict only ended when US-and UK-led NATO intervened. They bombed Serbia so heavily that its president, Slobodan Miloševi
ć
, was eventually forced to withdraw his troops and leave Kosovo to international forces. But today, the country is still divided. Take the ramshackle, northern town of Mitrovica. It's entirely Serb, and the people who live there have little time for Kosovo's parliament, its stamps or even its beer. Kosovo's brewery has to change the labels on bottles it sends there to remove any hint of Albanian.

Priština is a strange place to visit. The city's main street is called Bill Klinton Boulevard, and on it pride of place is given to an 11-foot-tall bronze statue of the former president, waving. If that doesn't make you realise he's seen as a hero here, there's also a 25-foot poster of him hanging off the apartment block behind, featuring Bill with those come-to-bed eyes, smiling, saying, ‘Welcome to Kosovo.' It's just above a coffee advert, though the coffee isn't named after Bill Clinton, which makes you feel they missed a trick. In the middle of town there's also a road named after Tony Blair and another after George W. Bush. There are other reminders of the war everywhere such as burned-out buildings and memorials for dead Kosovo Liberation Army soldiers. But despite the war feeling so close, whenever I try to get Mendi to speak about it, he either gives an extremely short answer or just changes the subject. He's moved on and his anthem is the biggest sign of that, he says.

He actually composed it back in 2008, almost a decade after the war, when the country declared its independence from Serbia. The government announced a competition: two and half weeks to enter; €10,000 to the winner. You could have words if you wanted, they just couldn't be potentially offensive to anyone. It is telling that very few entries included them. Mendi heard about the contest, sat down in his parents' house in the countryside and tried to write an entry. He'd had a melody stuck in his head for years hoping for just this moment – that he could be the one to write Kosovo's anthem – but it didn't quite feel complete, so he went fishing in a small river nearby and for walks in the forest, soon realising that the beautiful country around him was all the inspiration he needed to add the final touches. ‘It had to be peace music; that's what I realised,' he says. ‘An anthem shouldn't be saying, “Look at us, we are strong.” It shouldn't be fight music. I've had enough militarism in my life.'

He genuinely thought the tune he came up with that day would bring the country together, and musically it is a success: strings swoop up and down over timpani rolls like an eagle flying over mountains; horns proudly appear in a middle section to stretch out the melody; then the strings return, lifting the song as high as they can. It's the sort of music you'd normally hear at the end of a film: the hero has just kissed his girlfriend and the camera spirals up until the couple are only a dot on the landscape. It's an appalling cliché, yes, but it still works. I tell Mendi how much I like it – that surely it can't have gone down as badly with people here as he says, even without words. But it's not just the lack of words that's a problem, he says. ‘Look at the name: “Europe”. Why on earth did they call it that?'

‘I assumed that was your idea,' I say.

‘Argh, no,' he says, exasperated, and starts telling me it was just the code word he picked for his entry so no one would know it was by him. ‘I could have written anything: “blue”, “green”, “pink”. One day I was on a bus listening to some people talking and they said, “Have you heard we've got a new anthem? It's called ‘Europe'. Isn't that stupid? Aren't we from Kosovo?” And that was so upsetting for me. Why didn't the government use its actual name, “Hymn of Kosovo”? It was written at the top of the music. If my code word was “pink”, would they have told everyone the anthem of Kosovo was called “Pink”?'

Mendi tells this story in one breath, rushing through it as if trying to get to the end as quickly as possible. He doesn't slowly build up to the end and finish with the punchline like a good storyteller would, just a shrug as if to say, ‘This is Kosovo. What can I do?'

‘How long do you think your anthem will last?' I ask him. It seems a sensible question. If no one really likes it, or even really wants this country to exist, you'd think they'd eventually replace it. But he looks at me with disbelief and laughs for the first time since we've met. ‘Of course it'll last! It just needs words – and it will get them. When? I don't know, maybe ten years? We have listened to the Albanian national anthem for years like it's our own but I think the new generation will think differently. People will come to my tune. And I know I'm not being modest, but it's a really good anthem.'

Mendi's optimism is touching, but I think he underestimates quite what a sad situation he's in: he's written what's meant to be the most important song in his country's history, yet few people recognise what he's done. No one in this restaurant has even glanced at our table while we've been talking. Everyone has treated him like just another customer; nobody has nudged a friend to ask, ‘Isn't that …?' I doubt anyone here cares that his anthem perfectly illustrates Kosovo's history and situation today. In its wordless minute, you can read off everything from the fact this country is stalled and divided, to the legacy of its war and the desire to overcome it. It tells a bigger story than most composers achieve with entire symphonies. The fact it does, I realise, is enough to make me want to investigate these songs more. Surely there are other anthems that do the same, and ones that people actually care about? Surely there are places where anthem composers are lionised rather than forgotten? There might even be places where the story of an anthem is joyful (maybe not the ones for recent war zones, admittedly).

Excited, I start trying to run through ideas with Mendi for other countries whose anthems might be worth investigating, but he only half listens, distracted. ‘How about we get some lunch?' he says. ‘I have this friend, Jashar. He knows a great place in the country
and
he has a car. Let me call him. We can get a drink on the way.'