_1609.jpg "People singing the national anthem Negaraku at the Malaysia Day picnic at Taman Jaya, September 16, 2014. u00e2u20acu201d Picture by Saw Siow Feng")
KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 2 — Instead of a slow and melancholic tune, generations of Malaysians might have sung “Negaraku” to a more a rousing melody composed by renowned British composer Benjamin Britten.
Britten had been commissioned by the Malayan government to produce the country’s national anthem ahead of its Independence in 1957, and attempted to do so in collaboration with another prominent musician, violinist Yehudi Menuhin.
Despite Britten’s credentials as a central figure in classical British music as well as the Malayan administration’s desperation to secure an anthem — with two months left before Independence would be declared, the country had neither a song nor a flag — the composer’s submission was mysteriously rejected.
"Britten accepted the commission for two reasons," Mervyn Cooke of the University of Nottingham told BBC for its piece on Britten’s “lost anthem”.
"He strongly believed in writing useful music and anthems certainly fall into that category. But, more mundanely, the total fee of 100 guineas was quite considerable for such a tiny piece," said the scholar who is the preeminent authority on Britten’s links to Asia.
While the Malayan government never said why it opted to adopt French lyricist Pierre-Jean de Béranger’s "La Rosalie" — which had then been used as the Perak state anthem — Cooke surmised that it might have been due to Britten’s nationality.
The rejection was more mysterious given that other composers — including William Walton — approached by Malaya had declined the commission; none of the 500 entries received in a global competition also met their requirements.
But one clue may be in the Malayan government’s direction to Britten after his first draft was rejected: they returned his manuscript and asked that he make it sound more Malayan.
They also gave him tapes of local music for him to incorporate, though Britten thought little of these, calling them the “oddest noises” he had ever heard and categorised some as "mock-Western light music".
"The most likely reason is that on the momentous occasion of their independence from Britain, they felt it would be entirely inappropriate to have an anthem composed by an Englishman," Cooke surmised.
As the composer of the opera Peter Grimes and the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, Britten’s sound was quintessentially British.
The Briton had been “infuriated” by the rejection, but later admitted to his publisher that he “was too much in the dark over the whole matter to be able to please them.”
Britten’s composition has since slipped into the annals of history, having been played but once in public, in 2007 during a London concert to celebrate 50 years of Malaysia’s (then Malaya) independence from Great Britain.
