Sitting on the streetcar this morning, I read with great interest these words from the Guardian’s Paul Hayward on Manchester City’s problems dealing with the “big stage” of the Champions League:

The Champions League anthem is intended to convince every player this is the biggest night of his life, even in the group phase. At least one City player said he felt choked by its soaring notes when Napoli came to this ground. Munich was even more intoxicating. There is no time in this competition for sensory overload.

This came as somewhat of a surprise to me. I’ve always felt the Champions anthem was just a mediocre knock-off of George Frideric Handel‘s short, popular baroque masterpiece, Zadok the Priest, shoved in ahead of the matches to protect UEFA’s European broadcast rights (in much the same way the Premier League anthem is used, as we learned in the recent EU court ruling). And the words, a slap-dash pastiche in English, French and German, are beyond cringe-worthy:

Ce sont les meilleures équipes
Sie sind die allerbesten Mannschaften
The main event!

(Chorus)
Die Meister
Die Besten
Les grandes Équipes
The Champions!
Une grande réunion
Eine große sportliche Veranstaltung
The main event!
Ils sont les meilleurs
Sie sind die Besten
These are the champions!

(Chorus x2)
Die Meister
Die Besten
Les grandes Équipes
The Champions!
Die Meister
Die Besten
Les grandes Équipes
The Champions!

While “Eine große sportliche Veranstaltung” sounds stirring enough, it translates to “A major sporting event,” a lyric about as tasty as a rice cake. Then there are those manic, repeated reminders (likely meant for away fans looking askance at BATE Borisov and Otelul Galati) that these are in fact the best, the masterful, the big teams, the champions etc. etc. The composer, Englishman Tony Britten (no word on any relation to British musical genius Benjamin Britten) admits in this charming UEFA documentary that it was just “another job” and took “about six weeks” to compose, “it’s incredibly simple,” it lifted the string arpeggios almost directly from Zadok.

But take one or two steps back and the appeal of the anthem becomes a little more obvious. Most of the players heading out to play on “Europe’s biggest stage” are not, in actual fact, former Anglican church choir boys or classical music enthusiasts. For them, it sounds like a brilliant, original composition, likely because the soul of Handel’s compositional style remains semi-intact. And most were toddlers or small kids when the current Champions League format replaced the European Cup in 1992; for them the music symbolizes a competition they’ve been working to play in their whole lives. They grew up listening to it with nervous anticipation.

Plus the personnel responsible for the recording are no slouches in the classical music world; the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields Chorus are as good an outfit as any. The selection of Handel too as inspiration for the piece is ingenious; born in Germany, he trained as a young man in Italy, and then settled in London. There is perhaps no composer who better symbolizes pan-European unity than Handel.

It’s also safe to say Handel would approve of Britten’s adaption of his work for the Champions League. Handel was a great musical adapter often returning again and again to pilfer his own work, lifting old themes and effects for new compositions under great time constraints. He was in love with spectacle as anyone else and was above all a master of ‘affect,’ evoking emotion through music. For Handel, simplicity was no sin; Beethoven once said of him, “Go to him to learn how to achieve great effects, by such simple means.”

Fans wishing to download the anthem however are out of luck; UEFA notes with great pride it “cannot be bought or legally downloaded from any website.” You’ll just have to turn in this afternoon or turn up the volume during the next Heineken ad to hear it in all its soaring glory.