Guest Blogger: Brian C. Thompson on Music, Words, and National Holidays

Calixa Lavallée, the composer of “O Canada,” was the first Canadian-born musician to achieve an international reputation. While primarily remembered for the national anthem, Lavallée and his work extended well beyond Canada.

In ANTHEMS AND MINSTREL SHOWS, Brian Thompson analyzes Lavallée’s music, letters, and published writings, as well as newspapers and music magazines of the time, to provide a detailed account of musical life in 19th-century North America and the relationship between music and nation.

Previously portrayed as a humble French Canadian forced into exile by ignorance and injustice, Lavallée emerges here as ambitious, radical, bohemian, and fully engaged with the musical, social, and political currents of his time.

We’re thrilled to have Brian C. Thompson as a guest blogger today, writing about the upcoming national holidays and something you probably didn’t know about Canada’s beloved anthem.

La Fête Nationale et la Fête Du Canada

As Canada Day approaches, many Canadians will look forward to enjoying a break from the usual grind with a BBQ or picnic. For the more patriotic among us, the day will be something more: an affirmation of identity. Some of us may even seize the opportunity to contemplate the significance of these annual celebrations.

However we spend the day, it is likely to be celebrated with music. And mixed in with the pop, rock, rap, and country music, will be the more formal moments that call for the singing of “O Canada.” These performances may be followed by new petitions to modify the anthem’s English lyrics, passages of which some believe to be out of date in Canada of 2015. With this in mind, we might take the time to consider the song’s history, which goes back much further than many Canadians seem to realize.

The song’s composer, Calixa Lavallée, was about as conflicted as a person could be. He saw himself as an artist: a conductor, classical pianist, and composer. But he earned his livelihood mostly through popular music. He had been born in the colony of Canada East (now Quebec), in 1842, but from his mid teens he spent much of his life in the United States, and even took part in the Civil War as a Rhode Island bandsman. In the 1870s he made a break from popular culture, devoting his time and energy to Canada’s artistic development and to the creation of a national conservatory of music. By 1880, when he was asked to compose the music for a new national song, he was exhausted, in debt, and deeply frustrated with the young country’s political establishment. Still, he labored hard over the music. He then passed that now familiar melody along to his lyricist, Judge A.B. Routhier, an amateur poet but a pillar of the community, deeply committed to the country and to the culture he paid tribute to in his words.

The context was the Congrès Catholique Canadiens-Français, a massive gathering in Quebec City, aimed at strengthening French-Canadian identity. Organizers saw the event as an opportunity to create a national song that could be heard as French-speaking Canada’s counterpart to “God Save the Queen.” Inspired by the classics, Lavallée created music that was in time so successful that it was being sung throughout the country. With several versions of their own, English-speaking Canadians soon forgot that the song was originally about Quebec, and that its first public performance had taken place on June 24, Quebec’s national holiday.

An engraving of St-Jean-Baptiste crowds, Quebec City, 1880 (Canadian Illustrated News, 3 July 1880)

In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Quebec nationalists took pride in Lavallée’s achievements, while playing down the more knotty aspects of his biography. In the summer of 1933, Lavallée’s remains were repatriated to Montreal from their resting place in a Boston cemetery. With a flurry of speeches, radio broadcasts, concerts, and editorials, Lavallée and his music were re-introduced to a depression-era public in much need of inspiration. A generation later, everything had changed. By the time of the Quiet Revolution, Lavallée’s song had become anathema to Quebec nationalists for its association with Canada. And as if by magic, on 24 June 1975 Gilles Vigneault’s sang for the first time his “Gens du Pays,” a song that has for many become Quebec’s unofficial anthem.

My adopted home of Hong Kong, on the other hand, has no national song of its own. China’s jaunty “March of the Volunteers,” composed in 1935 by twenty-one-year-old Nie Er for a leftist film, serves as the official anthem of both Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China. In Hong Kong, it instills pride in some and loathing in others. It will be heard repeatedly on July 1, the date on which Hong Kong commemorates its return to Chinese rule in 1997 with fireworks and a public holiday (Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Establishment Day). Three months later, Hong Kong shares with Mainland China the October 1 national holiday, celebrating the Revolution of 1949. But while Hong Kong has only one day, people in the Mainland have a whole week off work – the so-called “Golden Week” holiday.

So, allow me to close with a proposal: that Canada follow China’s lead and celebrate our country with a “Golden Week” of our own. It would open on June 24, with coast-to-coast singing of the lovely “Gens du Pays,” and come to an end, a restful week later, with fireworks and Calixa Lavallée’s noble “O Canada” (sung to the lyrics of one’s choosing).

To learn more about Anthems and Minstrel Shows, click here.
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