Haydn composed this music in 1797 as a Birthday Anthem for the Austrian Emperor, entitled "Gott erhalte Franz der Kaiser." It became the official anthem of the Austrian Empire until 1918 and was then adopted by Germany in 1922 as the "Deutschlandlied." It was orchestrated by Tchaikovsky in 1874 but his version has evidently never been commercially recorded. The BBC gave its first public broadcast in 2007 in a mammoth series during which every note of Tchaikovsky's music was relayed over the air. From that series we hear it played by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Baldur Bronnimann.
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| Tchaikovsky's tomb at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
