One additional national anthem will provide an opportunity to consider the connection between music and nation. This time, our analysis will reveal little about the complex history of the nation, as was the case with “Song of the Germans” and “National Anthem of South Africa.” Instead, it will shed further light on the difficulty of assigning national identity to a melody.

The national anthem of Israel, entitled “The Hope” (Hebrew: “Hatikvah”), has a brief and uncomplicated history. It was immediately adopted on an unofficial basis when the nation of Israel was founded in 1948, and it became the official national anthem in 2004. The text was written in 1878 by the Polish poet Naphtali Herz Imber, and it expresses yearning for a return to the Jewish homeland. “The Hope” was used as an anthem by several Zionist groups, and beginning in 1897 it was sung at the Congresses of the World Zionist Organization, which advocated for the founding of an autonomous Jewish nation. As such, it came to represent Zionist sentiment throughout the Jewish diaspora.

The deep significance that “The Hope” had for Jewish people is evidenced by several stories from WWII-era concentration camps. In one recorded incident, a group of Czech Jews sang “The Hope” as they were escorted into the gas chamber at Auschwitz. The guards were enraged and beat them, but could not stop the singing. Reports from other camps indicate that the song was sung frequently by Jewish prisoners and that it brought them solace. When Bergen-Belsen was liberated, the inmates also sang “The Hope”—a recording of which was captured and broadcast to the world.

The melody to which Imber’s text has always been sung was provided by Samuel Cohen in 1888. He did not compose it but rather adapted it from a melody he had heard sung in Romania. The tune, however, is not Romanian. In fact, it can be traced to a 16th-century Italian song entitled “La Mantovana,” which has been attributed to the singer Giuseppe Cenci and was first published around 1600. The melody quickly became popular and soon had been paired with texts in Dutch, Polish, Ukranian, Romanian, and English.

Bedřich Smetana, “The Moldau”

Most famously, the melody was used by the Czech composer Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884) as the main theme for his nationalist symphonic poem “The Moldau” (1874), which belongs to a larger cycle of works entitled My Homeland. Here we begin to see the complexities surrounding “The Hope.” Decades before this tune came to communicate Jewish identity, and more than half a century before it would represent the nation of Israel, it was used to signify Czech identity and national sentiment.

Smetana’s “The Moldau” is an example of program music. It describes in sound the course of the famous Moldau river as it winds its way through the countryside and ultimately joins the Elbe river. “The Moldau” contains a succession of distinct sections. First, we hear the river emerge from a pair of warm and cold springs. It slowly gains strength until a mighty, expressive melody—that used for “The Hope”—bursts forth to represent the river. Next we hear the sounds of dance music as it might be played at a country wedding, followed by a nocturnal passage representing mermaids in the moonlight. Finally, the river theme returns, first in its original minor mode and then in a triumphant major.

How can an Italian melody develop and sustain both Jewish and Czech nationalistic connotations—all while continuing to be periodically mistaken for a Flemish, Polish, Ukranian, Romanian, and Scottish folk song? The answer has to do both with musical style and with the power of association. “La Mantovana” is an exceptionally simple tune. It contains two parts, one lower and one higher (a typical characteristic in many folk traditions). Both parts have a limited range and move primarily using stepwise motion. All of these attributes allow “La Mantovana” to be adapted in conformance with the conventions of various national styles.

However, association is more powerful than style. Listeners who first encountered this melody as representing the Moldau river and Czech identity will have a hard time hearing it in a different way. It has a similarly powerful (although quite different) meaning for Jews who grew up singing the Zionist lyrics. The multiple identities of the tune have created consternation in the Jewish community, and many have objected to its pairing with Imber’s text. All the same, efforts to find or create a new musical setting have always met with failure, and this melody continues to exercise enormous emotional power over a global population.