ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the iconic fanfare that opens the contest each year, the signature theme of the Eurovision television network of the European Broadcasting Union. This music is the first eight measures of the prelude of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s motet Te Deum in D major, composed in France during the reign of Louis XIV around the end of the seventeenth century. With its various associations of aristocracy, religion, and militarism, this music lends a historicizing high-culture patina and official-sounding pomp to a contest that celebrates a twentieth-century postwar ideal of pan-European cosmopolitanism and peaceful cooperation. But even in this established opening to the contest we can hear differences in the music’s arrangements and recordings over the years. Placing this tune in the context of the network’s founding, especially the address by Pope Pius XII for its inaugural broadcast in 1954, reveals the underlying values the music still signifies over six decades since its adoption.
