The tradition of performing musical odes at the English court dates back to the early seventeenth century. These large-scale works for orchestra, solo vocalists, and chorus were presented before the monarch and nobility for special occasions, including martial victories, New Year’s Day, births, peace treaties, the monarch’s birthday, the monarch’s safe return from abroad, and so on. It was not until the late seventeenth century that the tradition of performing an ode at court began to solidify and become a biannual one, when typically the master of the music and poet laureate would provide a work in honor of New Year’s Day and the king’s or queen’s birthday. It is surely not by chance that the heyday of the court ode in England — ca. 1689–1714 — coincided with both the period of the monarchy’s greatest instability and the reign of Queen Anne. In the context of a monarchy that was weakened and thereafter ruled by Parliament, following the volatility of the Civil Wars, the regicide, and the Cromwellian Interregnum, the court ode emerges as an important element in attempts to reassert the status of the sovereign and mold public opinion, all the more so in the wake of the further crisis of the monarchy in 1688–1689. Though some have argued that ceremony and culture declined during, or even because of, Queen Anne’s reign, the ode, by contrast, experienced a period of growth and was essentially stabilized as a tradition that would continue into the reign of George I and beyond.