January 6 – the birthday of the hymn “God Save the Tsar”
January 6, 1834 the anthem “God Save the Tsar!” Was adopted as the anthem of the Russian Empire. It was first publicly performed the day before, on December 18, 1833, and replaced the previous hymn, “The Prayer of the Russian People”
“God save the Tsar!
Strong, sovereign,
Reign in glory to us;
Reign in fear to enemiesOrthodox Tsar!
God save the Tsar! ”
January 6, 1834 the anthem “God Save the Tsar!” Was adopted as the anthem of the Russian Empire. It was first publicly performed the day before, on December 18, 1833, and replaced the previous hymn, “The Prayer of the Russian People.”
The original version of the national anthem of the Russian Empire was written in 1815 by Vasily Zhukovsky to the music of the English hymn “God save the King” (“God Save the King”) and approved by Alexander I in 1816.
In 1833, Prince Alexei Lvov accompanied Nicholas I during a visit to Austria and Prussia, where the emperor was greeted with an English march. Upon his return, the king instructed Lvov, as the musician closest to him, to compose a new anthem.
Zhukovsky rewrote the words of the new anthem, but with the participation of Alexander Pushkin. Lvov as a reward in 1834 was enlisted as an adjutant wing (with the rank of captain) in the corps of cavalry guards for the performance of the court service.
It was an official anthem until the February Revolution of 1917. After a forty-year hiatus, Soviet Russia heard him only in 1958 in the movie “Quiet Flows the Don.” In 1903, Umberto Giorgiano included the music of the anthem in the opera Siberia.
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky used the tune “God Save the Tsar!” In composition No. 31 Slavic March, at the end of the Solemn Overture of 1812, as well as in the Solemn March on the occasion of the coronation of Alexander III.
The author of the anthem, the composer Lvov, forty years later received an honorary place in the allegorical picture of Ilya Repin “Slavic composers” between Glinka, Dargomyzhsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev, Chopin, Oginsky and others.
In the novel-requiem of Mikhail Bulgakov “The White Guard”, which describes the events of the civil war in Ukraine at the end of 1918, Nikolka begins to sing the anthem, followed by Shervinsky, Myshlaevsky and Turbin Sr.
The creation of the anthem in 1833-1834 is not accidental. It was a time of formation, geographical expansion and political strengthening of the Russian Empire. On the eve of Uvarov for the first time he announced the formula “Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality.”
