Should Rule Britannia be sung at the Last Night of the Proms this year?

Should Golda Schultz, (pictured above) the black South African soprano who is to be the soloist at this year’s Last Night of the Proms, be expected to sing Rule Britannia? Or Land of Hope and Glory? Or any of the traditional patriotic songs that would normally delight the flag-waving, fancy-dress audience who normally belt out the choruses while millions sing along at home?

There will be no audience at all at the Royal Albert Hall this year, alas, on the Last Night or any other. A Proms season without Prommers promises to be a bit of a damp squib. All but the last fortnight broadcast by the BBC will be from its vast archive; the truncated two weeks of live concerts will play to an empty hall. Unless the paying customers return, the RAH itself will become insolvent next year.

Indeed, unless we can contrive to resume live performances with audiences at concert halls, churches and other venues, the very future of classical music is in question. Orchestras, choirs, opera houses and other ensembles are all withering away. The BBC promises that half of all the live soloists at this year’s Proms will be BAME, many of them young musicians such as the brother and sister duo Sheku and Isata Kanneh-Mason. But unless professionals can earn a decent living from making music, the talent will go elsewhere — especially where BAME communities are concerned. If we do not want classical music to become the preserve of a well-heeled, privately educated elite, the sooner normal service is resumed at the Proms and other festivals, the better.

The BBC — as the patron of five orchestras and, through Radio Three and its TV channels, the main vehicle by which many ordinary people gain access to classical music — has a huge responsibility for the survival of a tradition that has been woven into the fabric of our nation for centuries. The outgoing Director-General, Lord Hall, used to run the Royal Opera House, but Tim Davie, his successor, is CEO of BBC Studios — a bean-counting role. It does not inspire confidence that he will preserve the Corporation’s musical legacy. All the more reason for those who care about that legacy to watch and listen to the Proms this year: numbers speak louder than words.  

So what will happen on the Last Night? David Pickard, the Director of the Proms, is refusing to reveal whether the usual repertoire will be on the menu. The arguments are finely balanced. This is, after all, hardly the first time that this orgy of patriotism has been the subject of controversy. After the Brexit referendum, Union Jacks were joined by other flags, mainly of EU countries. It turned out that not only Europhiles but Europeans too love the Proms, including the Last Night. Most of the music isn’t British anyway.

But what about Rule Britannia? Is it reasonable to expect a black South African singer to lead the chorus of “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves”? When the song was composed by Thomas Arne in 1740, as part of a masque about Alfred the Great for performance at Cliveden, then the country seat of Frederick, Prince of Wales, it was arguably true that Britannia — in the shape of the Royal Navy — ruled the waves. And it is also true, as Michael Nazir-Ali, the first diocesan bishop from overseas to hold office in the Church of England, reminded us here on TheArticle this week, that slavery has been absent from the British Isles at least since St Anselm of Canterbury banned it on pain of excommunication almost a thousand years ago.

It is of course equally true that in British colonies the slave trade flourished for generations before and after Rule Britannia, until Parliament abolished it and the Royal Navy suppressed it in 1807. It took yet another generation before colonial slavery was finally abolished in 1833; even then, the slave owners were generously compensated. That this land of hope and glory was for so long the beneficiary of slavery is nothing to sing about — least for all for a black woman from one of those former colonies.

Yet for the BBC to excise the patriotic element from the Last Night of the Proms would not only disappoint the Prommers in silly hats. It would smack of a “cancel culture” that seeks to rewrite — or, to use Boris Johnson’s word, “bowdlerise” — history. It is simply wrong to turn the past into what we would prefer it to be, rather than what actually happened, as Bishop Nazir-Ali  (quoting the German founder of modern historiography, Leopold von Ranke) points out.

British history, like that of other nations, is fearfully complicated and so is its relationship with traditions such as the Last Night. We must beware of what the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt called the terribles simplificateurs — those who wish to reduce the ambiguities of the past to simple moral categories of good and evil. This cuts both ways. That even an historian and broadcaster of the calibre of David Starkey — full disclosure: he has been and remains a friend — could fall into such crudely racist language on the subject of slavery shows that as a nation we do have unfinished business here. Would we even be discussing slavery if there were no statues or songs left to remind us that it had ever happened?

The atmosphere at the Albert Hall, for all kinds of reasons, will be more sober than usual this year. If the old songs are to be sung again, they need a context. The jingoistic attitudes of the past may be long gone, but the knowledge is lacking to enable young people to see why the sentiments embodied in the music of Empire are not necessarily ignoble. If Golda Schultz is game enough to give the old nationalist warhorses a go, either she or the conductor, Dalia Stasevska, should have the chance to say a few words about them first. The tone should be serious rather than accusatory. The British have, after all, given so much to the world, not least our music. It is no bad thing to celebrate those contributions to civilisation — as long as we remember our lapses too.