Should the BBC be ashamed of the Last Night of the Proms?
(Photo by Bruno Vincent/Getty Images)
The BBC is not averse to blowing its own trumpet. “No one can do more to carry Britain’s voice and values to the world,” Lord Hall of Birkenhead tells the Edinburgh TV Festival. The Corporation is “the preeminent provider to the world of facts you can trust,” its outgoing Director-General boasts. Maybe it is. But can the BBC still be trusted to look after a British tradition that is even older than itself? According to sources quoted in the Sunday Times, the BBC is considering dropping Rule Britannia, Land of Hope and Glory and Auld Lang Syne from this year’s Last Night of the Proms on September 12. This year’s 125th season will be the “Black Lives Matter Proms”, a BBC insider says.
The Promenade concerts were founded in 1895 as the brainchild of its conductor Henry Wood, with the aim of bringing great music to the masses. The BBC took over the Proms only in the late 1920s and during World War II briefly abandoned its sponsorship. Rebranded as “the BBC Proms”, the summer classical music festival is the biggest in the world. For most of the last century, the Last Night of the Proms has included lighter music, including patriotic songs, with the audience dressing up, waving flags and singing along. The Last Night is not to everyone’s taste and the BBC has tried to tone down what it sees as the jingoistic atmosphere. Since 2016, as many European as British flags have been waved at the Last Night, but public opinion has been stubbornly resistant to major changes in the programme.
Now the combination of restrictions due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests have given BBC an opportunity to ditch the most controversial patriotic elements of the Last Night once and for all. The Royal Albert Hall is being reconfigured to accommodate an orchestra and soloists with social distancing and there will be no live audience participation.
The Finnish conductor of the Last Night, Dalia Stasevska, is said to be “a big supporter of Black Lives Matter and thinks a ceremony without an audience is the perfect moment to bring change”. Together with David Pickard, the Proms Director, and Golda Schultz, the black South African soprano who will be a soloist on the Last Night, Stasevska is said to be finalising a short live season. It will begin this Friday with a work by a black British composer, Hannah Kendall, and among the live soloists will be the young brother and sister duo Sheku and Isata Kanneh-Mason.
There is nothing wrong with celebrating the diversity of modern Britain. But there seems to be an assumption that a black British identity is incompatible with the traditional patriotism represented by the Last Night. Not all black Britons see it like that. One of them is Katharine Birbalsingh, the charismatic founding headmistress of Michaela School. “Last year I was at the Royal Albert Hall with black friends and black kids. We all waved flags and sang Rule Britannia,” she tweeted. “The white people in the audience did not tell us to stop, that the song isn’t ours, that we are too black to sing it. So what’s the problem?”
The problem is the BBC — memorably described in 2001 as “hideously white” by its own Director-General, Greg Dyke. In the last two decades, not much has changed at the top of the Corporation — Lord Hall will be succeeded by yet another middle-aged white male, Tim Davie — but it has embraced the “decolonisation” agenda with ever greater alacrity. In the brief history of the Proms on the Radio 3 website, the Last Night is not even mentioned. For the BBC, it has come to be an acute embarrassment.
The musical mayhem that takes over after the interval on the Last Night is quite unlike the other eight weeks of the Proms, but there is a reason why it is normally broadcast on BBC 1: it is very popular. At least 9 million people watch it in the UK, while many millions more tune in around the world. The patriotic sequence consists of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March no. 1, which includes Land of Hope and Glory, Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs (in one shanty the audience bobs up and down in time to the music), Thomas Arne’s Rule Britannia, Parry’s Jerusalem and the National Anthem, in Britten’s arrangement, concluding with Auld Lang Syne.
Before the second half gets fully under way, the conductor briefly addresses the audience. If the programme turns out to be “decolonised” this year, it will be for Dalia Stasevska to offer some sort of justification in her speech. A Finnish conductor would be wise to avoid lecturing the British public about the evils of nationalism. Finland fought on the Nazi side in the Second World War and, like the rest of Europe, has reason to be grateful to the British Empire — a fact of which, despite her youth (she is 35), Stasevska must surely be aware.
Even more to the point, perhaps, is the fact that Finland’s greatest composer, Jean Sibelius, was a fervent nationalist. Indeed, Finland would be unthinkable without his music. How would Stasevska feel if she were told that Sibelius were no longer to be performed? The same link between music and national identity is true of most European countries. The Norwegians have Grieg, the Czechs have Smetana and Dvorak, the Poles have Chopin, the Hungarians have Liszt, the Italians have Verdi, the Russians Tchaikovsky, and so on.
Americans, too, have their patriotic favourites, some of which are also open to the — admittedly inane — accusation of cultural appropriation. (Think of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, in which jazz is used to represent white New Yorkers.) As for the Germans and Austrians: need one even mention Wagner’s anti-Semitism or the Nazi associations of Richard Strauss, Carl Orff and others? Even Beethoven, whose Ninth Symphony has been appropriated by the EU, wrote a battle symphony in honour of the Duke of Wellington. To ban nationalism from the Proms would be to eviscerate the entire Western musical tradition. The very idea is philistinism on stilts.
The fact that no other nation has an annual event like the Last Night is no reason for the BBC to bowdlerise it. People from all over the world enjoy — and some pay to attend — what they see as a harmless celebration of British eccentricity. Those who disapprove can stay away or switch off. If the the BBC top brass really feel unable take responsibility for the Last Night of the Proms, they should hand it over to another sponsor. Another commercial TV company would jump at it. That is why the BBC will never give it up. But if Angela Merkel is not ashamed to listen to Wagner at Bayreuth, why should we — or our national broadcaster — be ashamed of Elgar at the Albert Hall?
