Yahoo Finance The Proms have always kept pace with the world. That’s why they’re so glorious
The row over the musical content of the Last Night of the Proms has played into the very worst tendencies of British manufactured controversies: it combines kneejerk BBC-bashing, a familiar and all-too-easy target, politicians meddling in concert programming, a laughable irrelevance and the hounding on social media of a conductor, a particularly unpleasant development.
Why all the fuss about a concert? Because the Last Night of the Proms has always been more than a concert; it is a national event, embedded for years in our calendar of regular rituals, relayed around the world. It has to respond to the mood of the moment and to change with changing circumstances. When the death of Diana happened in August 1997, we had to remove John Adams’s fanfare Short Ride in a Fast Machine.
When the atrocity of 9/11 occurred just before the Last Night in 2001, we removed all the nationalistic elements save for the utopian vision of Jerusalem and gave voice to universal hope for the future with the finale of Beethoven’s Choral symphony. In 1995, Sir John Drummond challenged the crowds by including Harrison Birtwistle’s acerbic Panic.
Years before, Proms controller Sir William Glock had encouraged extra elements of audience participation, including a newly commissioned work by Malcolm Williamson in the hope of weaning the crowds away from some of the popular favourites. It never quite caught on. And there could hardly be a more radical change of mood than this year, when artistic life has been ruined, concerts have been cancelled for months and we have lived without the cultural events that bring people together.
It is untrue that the Last Night is an unchanging ritual. Elements have come and gone over the years as conductors and programmers have tried new experiments; it is a prime example of what that great historian Eric Hobsbawm called an invented tradition. These events are not rooted in the distant past - rather, they aim to solidify and preserve a tradition that is in danger of disappearing. As David Cannadine has described in a perceptive analysis, so many aspects of British tradition, including royal ritual, date back not so much to the years of the empire as to the days of its decline.
It was as memorable music from the seafaring tradition going back to Trafalgar that Henry Wood collected the melody of Rule, Britannia! along with his other sea songs, from Tom Bowling to See the Conqu’ring Hero Comes to weave into the wholly orchestral sequence of his Fantasia on British Sea Songs. In all the years of Wood’s stewardship of the Proms, the words of the verses in Rule, Britannia! were never sung, though as a dusty archive recording from 1933 demonstrates, nothing could stop the audience joining in with the chorus.
It was with the arrival of the populist showman Malcolm Sargent at the Proms after the war, aided by the new power of television, that his own arrangement of Thomas Arne’s Rule, Britannia! with all its obscure verses was sung by a soloist. Hence the flags, hence the riotous traditions of stamping and shouting. It is for those who run the Proms now to decide what is relevant in a newly sensitive age and it is right there should be sensible debates around what is sung. But the way forward need not be to censor the past.
In our Proms time, we aimed to expand the appeal of the season, not restrict it: hence the invention of Proms in the Park, first in Hyde Park and then around the country, which eventually linked all four nations of the United Kingdom in a celebration with their own distinctive repertory, brought together and linked through television. We restored the original bugle calls with which Wood prefaced his sea songs and had them played from the four nations, leading into the original orchestra-only version of his Fantasia. Those were arguably different times, but any worry that one had about the salience of Land of Hope and Glory was mitigated when you heard it sung by a million people in the Mall during the Queen’s jubilee concerts of 2002. The superbly reflective opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics was another landmark in defining a changing British identity and it is up to cultural events to reflect these changes.
It is worth remembering that tonight, as the arts, artists and audiences alike, begin to recover from the most devastating crisis in our lifetime, for the first time in this country since the lockdown began, the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle will reunite to perform live at a Prom at the Royal Albert Hall. For the next two weeks, there will be nightly concerts, broadcast, as have been all Proms in living memory, free to air on BBC radio, with many on television.
Others have admirably begun to stage chamber concerts, but it is little short of a miracle that, faced with the uncertainty of the public health situation and the vacillations of government advice, the Proms have been able to mount a coherent series of events with our leading symphony orchestras. The marriage between the BBC and the Proms, which goes back to 1927, has been a uniquely creative and productive one, with extensive rehearsal ensuring the highest standards of performance and a commitment to commissioning and adventurous programming from its own orchestras and international guests.
The Proms are the envy of the world. We trust they will soon be back at full strength and, as usual, the real substance of the Proms will lie not in the antics of the Last Night, but in the inspiring seriousness of the preceding concerts.
• Nicholas Kenyon is managing director of the Barbican Centre, London, and was director of the BBC Proms from 1996-2007
