The Proms — can traditions change?

In his piece on Monday, Daniel Johnson, editor of TheArticle,  expressed disdain at the BBC’s plan to remove the singing of tunes such as Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory from the Last Night of the Proms. The story had everything for such a slow August news day: our beleaguered national broadcaster, ostensible wokeness, classical music, patriotism, colonialism, tradition, and, underneath it all, sycophantism. 

Already mired in a divisive culture war, we now know what usually follows: anger at the erosion of tradition, protests at the bourgeois PC nature of the still largely white and male BBC, and whole swathes of anguish on Twitter. Boris Johnson, ever keen to be seen as a bumptious bearer of decent common sense, said he hoped the “general bout of self recrimination and wetness,” would be ignored. It was, above all else, a clever political move, letting the Prime Minister react to a seemingly textbook example of wokeness in the flesh and taking the view of the ordinary patriotic man or woman by dismissing it. Even Keir Starmer joined in the debate, asserting that the event was “a staple of British summer.”

The whole debate was, however, conducted under a false premise. The BBC has said that it will be having only instrumental versions of the most well-loved songs, given that a small group of singers performing to a largely empty hall would sound strange to the millions watching at home. Supposedly, this was the only motive, although some artists have expressed the predictable wish to make the event more “inclusive” . There are apparently no plans for the same conditions to be in place next year, depending of course on whether we are allowed back into concert halls.

Even though the episode has a strong “fuss over nothing” feel to it, I think it raises an important point. Are our traditions, especially our musical ones, finite? Much of the Last Night is made up of new music from a wide range of composers. The debate does of course go beyond musical preference; I hope it’s not too controversial to say that the National Anthem is an interminable dirge, and that Rule Britannia is simplistic in structure. Good melodies, yes, but there is so much more to English music than a yearly rendition of what are really eighteenth-century pub tunes.

Indeed, Hubert Parry, composer of Jerusalem, Repton (the tune to Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, and the coronation anthem I Was Glad) was almost the opposite of the easy-going and serenely patriotic man some of his music suggests — he was in fact a self-effacing Darwinian agnostic. Just listen to his Songs of Farewell , composed in the face of his own mortality and the deaths of his music pupils in the Great War, and see if you are not emotional by the end.

In entering into such a debate like this, we risk attaching identities to pieces or composers. As Daniel Johnson said, Sibelius was a fervent nationalist, whose powerful music is now emblematic of a modern nation proud of its past resistance to Soviet aggression. Look at the Estonian Arvo Pärt, who is revered in his home country, and who evokes much of his homeland in his music. We should never be ashamed of Wesley, Elgar, Parry, Britten, but their music should never be instantly labelled “patriotic”, or even inherently English, without examining such composers’ own characters first. Take Shostakovich, acclaimed for his bravery, who still leaves a complicated political legacy for his intellectual actions in the face of Stalin’s threats . A composer’s political beliefs, if we are excepting Wagner or Carl Orff, should never be served up with equal importance as the music on the other side. Let the notes speak for themselves.

I love the Proms, and make sure that many of my usual summer evenings every year are spent traipsing round Hyde Park to the Albert Hall with others: it’s one of the best musical ventures in the world, and should be cherished above much of the provincial theatres (rather too keen on repetitive productions of murder mysteries and pantomimes) which received much of the government’s art funding. The genius of the Proms lies in mixing the well-known with a good dose of the new, and letting the audiences judge for themselves, while never offering them extortionate prices.

Let us revel in it while we can, without excessive self-flagellation, and look to paint a picture of Britain which we can, and should, be proud of, one that is equally representative of our history; victories and tribulations, episodes both shameful and worthy of celebration.