God Save the Queen

Video capture from 'Iolanthe' (1998)

At the beginning of each Durham Savoyards performance, the audience welcomes the Queen into her royal box with the singing of the National Anthem of Great Britain, "God Save the Queen," accompanied by the orchestra, with the able vocal assistance of the Lords and Ladies of the Royal Chorus in attendance in the box seats, along with unseen vocal support of the cast and company gathered onstage behind the curtain.

Play a demo using sampled sound fonts: ↓

Our arrangement is based on a quotation by Arthur Sullivan found near the end of his ballet, Victoria and Merrie England. The choral parts and orchestration were adapted by Alan Riley Jones from Wilfred Bendall's 1897 piano reduction of the ballet. You may download the sheet music of the vocal arrangement and of the orchestration below free of charge.

Download sheet music:
Vocal/piano sheet music Full Conductor's Score Orchestra Parts All-in-one

If you would like to practice up on a vocal part, here are some part recordings which may assist you. Click one of the buttons below to hear the sound file via the audio player at the top of this page next to the menu. Click an arrow (↓) to either play the sound file in your browser's audio plug-in, or begin a download (depending on your browser settings). Right-click an arrow and select "Save target as.." or "Save link as..." to download the sound file and play it locally.

Change Tempo slider: You can slow the tempo of the playback by sliding the light blue knob on the above "Change tempo" slider to left and right along the track. Tempo begins at 100% at the right end and changes by 1% increments to a minimum of 50% at the left end. Note that slowing the tempo introduces distortion into the audio playback. (Supported in Firefox, Chrome, and Opera web browers.)