King George approved of the Water Music

Text 1:

King George approved of the Water Music so much that he demanded the entire composition — lasting an hour — be repeated three times: once on the way to supper at Chelsea, once during supper, and again on the return journey. It was an immediate hit with the public, quickly taken up at playhouses and performed by the theatre orchestras before curtain-up and during the interval. Before long, most of London had at least a nodding acquaintance with the work. The success of the event must have caused some discomfort to the King’s son, Prince George: he and his wife Caroline were conspicuously absent from the Water Music festivities. But for King George (and for Kielmansegge) it was not only a successful exercise in propaganda, it was also a turning point for royal music. The Water Music was the first example of royal music being deployed for the purposes of the spectacle, with no spiritual or even obvious ceremonial purpose. Instead, what George had done was to transform the River Thames into a theatre-cum-concert hall, with himself and his subjects as an enthusiastic audience. 

This trend towards purely theatrical royal music would magnify throughout the eighteenth century, and the reasons for this are inextricably linked to certain unprecedented political developments — the rise of a second parallel monarchy in Britain known as the premiership. With the gradual transferral of power from palace to parliament, the House of Hanover would become increasingly irrelevant, and so too would its awkward, unattractive kings. For George, as for his Hanoverian successors, royal ceremony and its musical accompaniment, shorn* of any kind of religious or — even very much national — raison d’être, would increasingly become merely, if gloriously, theatrical.

Excerpt from David Starkey, Music and Monarchy, Ebury Publishing 2013.

*shorn of = débarrassé de

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The scene is set in:

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Germany

Great Britain

The USA

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The scene takes place in the country’s capital.

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Select the odd man out.

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playhouses

performed

theatre

subjects

curtain up

interval

spectacle

audience

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The scene takes place:

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two centuries ago.

nowadays.

in the recent past.

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The scene takes place during Elizabeth I’s reign. 

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QUESTION 6

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The text deals with a king’s love of music:

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as a form of entertainment.

as a political tool.

to display his power.

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Select the words which best convey the text’s main message:

 Attention : les réponses incorrectes donnent lieu à un malus.

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unattractive

turning point

theatrical

discomfort

propaganda

success

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The author of the text seems to approve of the events related.

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Text 2:

THIS DAY IN HISTORY: 1977 May 31

The BBC bans the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen”

Thirty years after its release, John Lydon — better known as Johnny Rotten — offered this assessment of the song that made the Sex Pistols the most reviled and revered figures in England in the Spring of 1977: “There are not many songs written over baked beans at the breakfast table that went on to divide a nation and force a change in popular culture.” Timed with typical Sex Pistols flair to coïncide with Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee, the release of “God Save the Queen” was greeted by precisely the torrent of negative press that Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren had hoped. On May 31, 1977, the song earned a total ban on radio airplay from the BBC — a kiss of death for a normal popular single, but a powerful endorsement for an anti-establishment rant like “God Save the Queen”.

(…)

Like naughty schoolboys concerned only with the approval of their peers, the Sex Pistols baited the British establishment throughout their brief career, but never more so than during the Silver Jubilee when they took to the waters of the Thames and attempted to blast “God Save the Queen” from giant speakers onto a boat chartered by Virgin records chief Richard Branson, the police dutifully responded by chasing the boat down and arresting its passengers when they reached the dock. When members of Parliament threatened to ban all sales of the single, a Virgin spokesman replied: “It is remarkable that MPs should have nothing better to do than get agitated about records which were never intended for their Ming vase sensibilities”. Like the BBC ban announced on this day in 1977, these incidents only fed the controversy the Sex Pistols had set out to create.

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