Pride and prejudice: national anthems window to a nation's soul

Sensitive to all music my highly-evolved ears always especially prick up whenever national anthems are performed.

I know I'm not alone in this, not only because I just caught World Cup commentators sighing praise of the Welsh national anthem Land Of Our Fathers (played and sung before the Wales versus USA match) but also because the internet bristles with connoisseurs' selections of favourite anthems.

UK Classic FM's selection, what it calls its "unofficial ranking of the world's greatest national anthems, from a classical music perspective" (and concentrating on tunes, not on words) is especially fine and entertaining and comes with videos of anthem occasions.

Fun as it is to rank anthems, one is more interested in the strange psychology of their sentimental-emotional melodic appeal or lack of appeal.

It plays with the mind to feel patriotic feelings for nations other than one's own but for the sensitive and especially the musically-sensitive the best anthems have that power to render one temporarily a proud national of the nation being anthemised.

In recent weeks, glued to the aforementioned assorted sporting tournaments and their anthem-enriched preliminaries, I have known temporary patriotic citizenship of miscellaneous nations, including and especially Samoa.

And so a rendition of New Zealand's super anthem leaves the sensitive non-New Zealander effectively a New Zealander for quite some time. Thus in football matches played between New Zealand and Australia the sensitive Australian finds himself barracking for the Kiwis often until half-time and even beyond

The melody of the just-mentioned Welsh anthem is another case in point.

The USA anthem juxtaposed with it at the World Cup to my ear has an unpleasantly bragging, swaggering, belligerent, let's-make-America-great-again tune.

Meanwhile, automatically siding us with Wales, the Welsh anthem's tune has a kind of hymn-like quality.

So even when, non-Welsh, one does not know what's being sung about one feels it is not being sung not so much in praise of Wales as in praise of God.

I declare a bias here because Anglican hymns were a big part of my fondly-recalled childhood so that any music with some emphatic hymnody about it always has a head start with me.

And so for me the worst anthems are the ones that have nothing hymn-like about their melodies.

Among the awful anthems heard during the T20 Cricket there was one that sounded like an advertising jingle for something cheap and perhaps questionable (perhaps a treatment for baldness).

The team with that long-winded, multiple-versed jingle for its anthem did poorly in the T20 Cricket and it may be that some nations' anthems sap their people's morale and that in this case the cricketers were never able to rise above what their anthem had done to them.

What chance did they have, these poor anthem-debilitated cricketers, against the anthem-galvanised New Zealanders who gambolled out to play with patriotic joy in their hearts and a nationalistic spring in their feet?

But the judging and appreciating of national anthems poses assorted dilemmas.

So for example is it permissible to judge an anthem on its melody alone, not taking its words into account?

My incomplete studies show the musically finest-sounding anthems are often melodically supporting banal and sometimes jingoistic words.

The melodically superb Welsh anthem Land Of My Fathers has some verses dripping with the "lifeblood" shed by heroes and with blood of the savage "foemen" the heroes have slain in defending the land of their fathers.

France's anthem, musically inspiring, is splashed with the blood and guts of the scum that have dared to rub France up the wrong way.

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Other anthem-appreciating, anthem-judging issues arise when an anthem one instinctively loves is the anthem of a nation one feels one really ought to despise.

So for example the aforementioned UK Classic FM list has Russia's anthem as its No.3 (after Uruguay's and Poland's) with the Classic FM judge enthusing: "What an anthem! Is it any wonder the country that gave us Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and Rachmaninov has such a cracker? I've loved this tune since I used to hear it at gold medal ceremonies for the Olympics. I've even got it on my mobile phone."

He's right. That anthem's tune is an absolute ripper. It has about it a dignified sincerity that enables it to shine even when it is being shyly tinkled by a lone pianist at a piano. For an example of the latter you can find on YouTube (I have just watched this myself, feeling conflicted feelings) Vladimir Putin himself at the piano tickling out the anthem.

It is a truly stirring tune and one has always loved it but now, and especially when one sees and hears it played by the most despised man on Earth, one is no longer sure what it is that is being stirred.

My favourite anthem of the recent and present blizzard of pre-match anthems?

No contest!

We all know the saying the opera isn't over until the fat lady sings but last Sunday's Australia versus Samoa rugby league World Cup grand final couldn't begin until the quite substantial Samoan lady had performed her nation's national anthem.

What a fabulous performance it was! Her eyes and teeth sparkling with the rapture of being Tongan, she set Old Trafford's rafters ringing and some of us feeling deeply, temporarily Samoan with the jubilant hymn (in which Jesus himself gets a reverent mention) of her nation's anthem.