Sorry I Haven't A Clue theme tune?!
Question:
Sorry I Haven't A Clue theme tune?
Hello. I would really like to download the theme tune to Sorry I Haven't A Clue, the radio 4 comedy programme. I don't want the talking over it like you get on the show, just the music. Any ideas? I have looked on the web but need a bit of help as I can't seem to track it down. Thanks.
Answers:
OK, here is the whole scoop and nothing but the scoop:
"The theme music to I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue is from the film Monte Carlo or Bust as an adaptation of Haydn’s Austrian Hymn.
According to the Oxford Companion to Music, the arrangement was composed by Haydn in 1797 and was the national hymn of Austria (Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser) from then until 1918. After that, the tune was retained but with new, non-Imperial words by Ottokar Kernstock (Sei gesegnet ohne Ende).
Apparently, the author of the original words (Lorenz Leopold Haschka, Count von Saurau, Austria’s Imperial High Chancellor) wanted a national song to equal Britain’s God Save the King. He gave them to Haydn to set, believing him to be the only composer capable of doing the job adequately. The Oxford Companion to Music adds that the enterprise was largely intended as a counterblast to the French Revolution.
Haydn took one of the Croatian folk melodies of his childhood and altered and extended the later part so that it would fit the chancellor’s stanza-lengths. He made a number of versions, still to be seen, before arriving at the version now familiar. This is also used in Britain as the tune of a familiar hymn, under the name Austria.
You can hear the tune in a set of variations in Haydn’s Emperor Quartet, written afterwards. In old age Haydn loved to play it on the piano, and it was indeed the last music he ever played.
Its adaptation in the film introduces a bullet-headed German rally driver J.J. Shickel (played by Gert Fröbe), and was no doubt intended to suggest the German national anthem - Das Deutschlandlied. The music in the film, called the Shickel Shamble, was composed by Ron Goodwin who also conducted it". Whew! And good luck with your project!