Three Centuries, One Unbroken Cue

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.