The piece of music heard during the broadcast of King George VI's 1939 radio speech is the second movement Allegretto of Ludwig van Beethoven's 7th Symphony. It was slightly altered to suit the movie, by mimicking the King's speech patterns: the immediate repetition of the movement's opening woodwind chord is a "musical stammer" similar to the King's stutter; the tempo (roughly 44 beats per minute) is slow relative to Beethoven's Allegretto indication (meaning "moderately quick"), and the silences between the musical phrases are lengthened through extreme rubato (meaning that the music is played not in strictly even time, but rather with some flexibility). These alterations communicate the King's progression from a nervous start to a confident, flowing delivery.

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