720 THE SURVIVAL OF CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY
THE MYTHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE NATIONAL ANTHEM
A study of the evolution of the national anthem of the United States reveals that it
was derived from music that had once been a setting for words on a classical theme.
A succinct summary of the origin and development of "The Star-Spangled Banner" is
given by Hitchcock:
The song destined to become the national anthem was anything but patriotic to begin with.
Addressed "to Anacreon in Heav'n," the tune later sung as The Star-Spangled Banner orig-
inated as a British drinking song, celebrating the twin delights of Venus and Bacchus.
Taken up by Americans, it was given new patriotic words in 1798 by a (not THE) Thomas
Paine, who sang of "Ye sons of Columbia, who bravely have fought/For those rights, which
unstained from your Sires had descended. " The Star-Spangled Banner text, which was com-
posed in 1814 by Francis Scott Key after the bombardment of Fort McHenry by the British,
was applied to the old tune, and the resulting song was made the national anthem in 1931.^19A bronze statue of Orpheus by the sculptor Charles Niehaus stands at the entrance
to Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Maryland, as a monument to Francis Scott Key. It was
dedicated by President Warren Harding in 1922.cast included Irving Berlin and Ted Snyder, who sang interpolated songs of their
own. The plot is similar to that of an earlier show, Apollo in New York, produced
by W. E. Burton and his troupe in 1854.
The Boston Group or Second Nezv England School. In the second half of the nine-
teenth century, classical music of substance and quality came to be written by
native American composers. American music may, with some justice, be said to
begin with John Knowles Paine (1839-1906), the educational father of many im-
portant and influential American composers, musicians, and critics. Paine, who
became an excellent organist, studied music in Europe, particularly in Germany,
and became a professor of music at Harvard; his compositions deeply reflect his
European training. The influence of Bach and German romantics such as Mendels-
sohn, Schumann, and Brahms, in particular, is strong; but Paine is an American,
and his works are in their own right powerful and original, as are those of many
of his contemporaries and disciples, who were not untouched by the influence
of classical themes. Paine himself was sometimes inspired by Greece and Rome;
he composed music for a production at Harvard of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyran-
nus (1881) in the original Greek. His other compositions include an orchestral
piece, Poseidon and Amphitrite, an Ocean Fantasy, and a cantata, Phoebus Arise.
Three other important composers out of the many comprising The Boston
Group should be singled out for their use of classical themes. George Whitefield
Chadwick (1854-1931), a church organist who studied in Germany and became
the director of the New England Conservatory of Music, wrote three Concert