Dignitaries had been gathering at the French Embassy in Ottawa for an hour. Wine was flowing. Hors d’oeuvres fast disappearing. And finally, an assistant to the ambassador announced that His Excellency was in the hall. The din dissipated and our attention was directed to a mezzanine level where a woman dressed in red, white and blue began to sing.
“O Caa-naa-daa,” she began in elongated, almost dirge-like tones.
“Oh no,” I thought. “This is going to be another of those interminable renditions of our national anthem.”
I was exactly right. The regular crisply composed O Canada in the hands (or vocal chords) of this wonderfully talented but sadly misinformed singer had now become an epic poem sounding more like an opera solo than the march its composer Calixa Lavallée had intended. She took nearly four minutes to sing what is normally a quick, one-minute-long melody. But I guess the French ambassadorial staff wanted to make a powerful statement about their heart-felt relationship with their Canadian hosts. I guess I couldn’t argue with the sentiment. After all, the event I was attending, a French tribute to battle at Vimy Ridge, did require some flag-waving and anthem singing.
But sadly, in the past few years, national anthems have been trotted out incessantly and in places and situations with questionable connection to our national identity. Most notably in sports venues before hockey games, baseball games and in a recently embarrassing instance just before Game 3 in the Miami Heat – Toronto Raptors NBA playoff series. That rendition saw all-star shooting guard Dwayne Wade continue to toss basketballs at the hoop even as O Canada was sung by the pre-game anthem singer.
“It’s something that I do before every game,” Wade told ESPN.com. “I’ve been doing it my whole career.”
You keep on throwing the basketball during the singing of a national anthem, including the Stars and Stripes? Isn’t that disrespectful, Mr. Wade? But maybe the all-star shooting guard is simply validating my point. What are O Canada and the Star-Spangled Banner doing inside Miami’s American Airlines Arena or the Air Canada Centre in Toronto in the first place? I tend to agree with a position expressed this week by U.S. sports writer Kyle Koster on The Big Lead website:
“It comes to a point where you get diminishing returns,” Koster wrote. “If you were to reserve the playing of national anthems to special occasions like the playoffs, or in times of great national pride or great national strife, when there’s a sense of ‘Hey, let’s pause and reflect on what it means to be an American or Canadian,’ it would be more impactful.”
I agree. Who needs statements of national pride when it’s clearly not timely? Koster went on to recall the one appropriate uber-performance of the Star-Spangled Banner by pop singer Whitney Houston prior to Super Bowl XXV, in 1991. Sensing the imperative of the moment, she belted the final lines “O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave” in a magical tribute to the soldiers and families involved in the Persian Gulf War.
“It was an intense time for the country,” Houston said at the time. “A lot of our daughters and sons were overseas fighting. I could see in the stadium … the fear, the hope, the prayers. I felt like this is the moment.”
OK, I get that. But I don’t understand the abuses that pre-game singers take with our national anthems. They almost always pantomime around each lyric or line. They draw each image into a musical melodrama. And they warble all around the notes as if hitting the actual melody line would only indicate partial patriotism or negligible national pride.
Meanwhile back at the French Embassy where the lady in red, white and blue had transformed O Canada into a tome, a number of us in attendance joined in, instinctively singing the lyrics faster; we were sort of willing her version to end. And just when we thought the marathon anthem singing was over, she took polite applause and, of course, launched into the singing of her home national anthem, La Marseillaise. Even at a marching clip, La Marseillaise takes five minutes to sing, but this singer made it feel like an entire Paris opera.
Sure, the extended version was quite appropriate when it was sung at Wembley Stadium on Nov. 18, 2015, after the terrorist attacks in Paris. Or, in the streets of Paris, in 2014, on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Paris. Then, sing it as loud and as long as it takes.
But let’s take it out of hockey, baseball and basketball arenas, where the players and fans would just as soon keep their caps on and get on with the game. I think it’s time for national anthems to take a time-out from sports venues. Sing a national anthem with purpose when there is a purpose.
I hate it when the “divas” mangle O Canada. Why can’t these singers just stick to the original melody, the way the composer meant it to be sung. Why do they insist on personalizing the national anthem. I realize that this is an older post but ironically 2016 is the same year that Martina Ortiz-Luis became the new voice of the Toronto Maple Leafs. She is a prime example of a diva personalizing a national anthem, MY national anthem.