In a letter to the writer Stefan Zweig, he said: “I am whiling away the dull days of advent by composing an Olympic Hymn for the plebs — I of all people, who despise sports.”
The 1948 games, hastily convened in war-torn London, opened with a performance of an ode by Roger Quilter and saw the Polish composer Zbigniew Turski take gold for his Olympic Symphony. Coubertin would have glowed at the presence of Micheline Ostermeyer, the remarkable Frenchwoman who won gold in both shot-put and discus, as well as bronze in the high jump. She celebrated her shot-put victory by giving an impromptu Beethoven recital at the French team headquarters.
“Sport,” she said, “taught me to relax; the piano gave me strong biceps and a sense of motion and rhythm.”
In 1950, she retired from athletics to resume her career as a concert pianist.
The 1948 games saw the end of the Olympic arts competitions, due to the growing difficulty of proving the amateur status of participants, but they had fulfilled Coubertin’s ambition of enshrining music in Olympic culture.
As Beijing will show, many types of music play a part — but it is classical music that has traditionally set the Olympics apart from what Coubertin called “plain sporting championships.”
John Williams, the US film score composer, wrote for the 1984, 1988 and 1996 Olympics.
He explained the attraction of the games thus: “The inspiration comes from the mythological idea we all seem to feel. It’s about deities and heroes that lived up in the mountain somewhere, that could do something we couldn’t do.”
Although Coubertin’s view of the Olympics now rings a little hollow, as drug-taking and commercialism threaten to consume today’s games, he would doubtless have approved of Williams’ lofty sentiments.
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