Zadok the Priest (Handel, HWV 258)

Very little written for a single occasion in 1727 is still performed, note for note, at the exact same moment in a ceremony three hundred years later. Handel's Zadok the Priest has managed it. Composed for the coronation of George II and first heard at Westminster Abbey on 11 October 1727, it has been sung immediately before the anointing of the sovereign at every British coronation since, without a single break in the run, most recently for Charles III in May 2023.

The text is older than Handel by roughly seven and a half centuries as a coronation formula, drawn from the account in 1 Kings of the priest Zadok anointing Solomon king of Israel, and English and British coronations had used some version of that same biblical language since Edgar's crowning at Bath Abbey in 973. What Handel supplied was not new words but a specific musical setting so effective, an opening built from a long, quiet orchestral crescendo before the choir enters at full force, that it displaced whatever had come before it and has not been displaced since.

The result is a strange kind of permanence for a piece of occasional music. Most anthems written for a single royal event fade into concert programs or disappear entirely. This one became load bearing: the actual cue a modern monarch's anointing waits for, unchanged in function across a stretch of history that has otherwise rewritten nearly everything else about how the ceremony is staged and broadcast.

Ask a British choral singer to name a piece of church music, and Zadok the Priest is a near certain answer, which is a little odd given how narrow its official job description actually is. It exists to be sung at exactly one kind of event, a coronation, that happens perhaps once in a generation. Everywhere else it appears, football tournaments, graduation ceremonies, film soundtracks, it is technically off duty, borrowed for its sound rather than its function.

That borrowing is easy to understand on listening. The piece opens with close to ninety seconds of pure orchestral buildup before the eight part choir enters together at full volume, a structural trick that turns a liturgical cue into one of the most recognizable entrances in choral music. Handel wrote it as one of four anthems for the same 1727 coronation, but the other three, The King Shall Rejoice, My Heart Is Inditing and Let Thy Hand Be Strengthened, never achieved anything close to the same independent life outside the ceremony that produced them.

The Church of England's own coronation liturgy is what keeps the piece anchored to its original purpose, placing it at the single most theologically weighted moment of the rite, immediately before the sovereign is anointed. Everything else the anthem has become, patriotic standard, popular culture reference, football chant tune, sits downstream of that one specific, still functioning liturgical assignment.