Handel George Frideric Archives

The Anointing of Solomon by Cornelis de Vos. According to 1 Kings 1:39, Zadok anointed Solomon as king. Image accessed via Wikipedia.

To answer that question it’s necessary to delve into the following ideas:

1. A history of British coronations dating back to 973.

2. An explanation of why a German composer, George Frederick Handel, was commissioned to write a set of coronation anthems for a British ceremony in 1727.

3. A look at the source of the actual text for the anthem referencing said Zadok.

Let’s start with #3. Zadok was the high priest of Israel at the time of King Solomon’s coronation around 970 BCE. The story about his role in this event comes from the book of I Kings in the Jewish Bible; the text for the anthem is shortened and simplified to read:

Image by Roger Casco Herrera from Pixabay

Well, duh. From the Bible, of course. We all know that. But when a pieces becomes so familiar, so ingrained in our consciousness, we forget sometimes that they’re actually about something–that the composers started with an idea, a nugget of truth, a theme.

Let’s first look a selection from Franz Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Creation: “The Heavens Are Telling,” is not from the first chapter of Genesis as you might have expected. Instead, it’s from Psalm 19, the first verse of which is: The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. (King James Version, thus the strange spelling of “sheweth” and “handywork.”)