THE PEOPLE who shaped the THE PROMS
To celebrate the 125th anniversary of the Proms, Michael White introduces the extraordinary figures, past and present, who have moulded and changed this august and unique music festival
T he Proms have never been a simple concert series: they outgrew that almost from the start, turning into a statement of the nation’s musical credentials – with peculiar status as a platform for what counted as significant at any time from 1895, when they began, through to the present day.
It’s a responsibility that hangs (occasionally like a millstone) round the neck of Proms administrators, and it’s why Proms seasons matter. But they matter, too, as a community of people who across the years have been the flesh and blood of this great enterprise. Proms people.
From conductors and soloists to generations of audience members, there are thousands of them, so the few I’ve picked to celebrate here can’t be more than illustrative. But they give a sense of how the Proms season has developed over time, shaped by successive personalities into a mighty celebration that survived two world wars and will survive what the world is facing now. Albeit with some adaptation.
Proms in the Park
How the Last Night moved outdoors The idea of a Proms in the Park event back in the mid-1990s was pooh-poohed by John Drummond (see p31) who suggested he’d be happier watching the last Night of the Proms on telly than sit ‘in a damp park’. But the old curmudgeon was proved wrong, and in 1996, 28,000 turned up at London’s Hyde Park to watch Sheridan Morley present a mix of classical and popular artists, with a live link-up to the Albert Hall for the second half of the Last Night. Millions listened on BBC Radio 2.
Such was its success that an annual event was born. By 2005, Proms in the Park had spawned sister events in Belfast, Manchester, Swansea and Glasgow, with each ‘region’ celebrating its identity through performances of Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs. Presenters such as Terry Wogan (above) and Alan Titchmarsh sealed the Proms in the Park as a ‘middle-of-the-road’ event, while its broadcast was organised by BBC Live Events, rather than the BBC Proms department. Today, Proms in the
Park thrives – last year’s featured soprano Aida Garifullina alongside Barry Manilow, Lighthouse Family and Chrissie Hynde, all accompanied by the BBC Concert Orchestra. Festival figures: (right) a 1926 cigarette card of Proms founder Henry Wood; (far right) conductor Malcolm Sargent and violinist Paul Beard in 1962; (below) the badly mistreated Edgar Speyer
Henry Wood (1869-1944)
Henry Wood was 26 when, in 1895, he was hired to lead a brand new season of ‘Promenade’ concerts at the Queen’s Hall; and he remained in charge for the next half-century, conducting some 5,000 of them. With 700 premieres and so little rehearsal time it was crazy. When conductor Thomas Beecham said, ‘I don’t know how you do it: it would kill me’, Wood’s reply was ‘Yes’. And it did almost come to that: in 1902 he had a breakdown.
But he was always a larger-than-life character: flamboyant on the podium to a degree that few British conductors before him had thought appropriate, and prompting Queen Victoria to ask him
‘Tell me, Mr Wood, are you quite English?’ He most definitely was, and always championed English music – not least Vaughan Williams, the premiere of whose Fifth Symphony amid the war-torn 1943 season remains one of the Proms’ most symbolic moments and a complete cycle of whose symphonies (five to date) was programmed shortly after Wood’s death. Wood, though, also introduced audiences to unfamiliar European repertoire and stood up for the German classics at the height of anti-german feeling.
The initial premise of the Proms was, as expressed, to ‘train the public’ into broader musical awareness; and Wood’s training programme had a comprehensive reach. He taught his audience not to applaud between the movements of a long work. He also taught them to accept female orchestral players, introducing women to his band in 1913 (though he didn’t want his ladies playing trombones).
His credentials as a truly great conductor are debatable, but he had no shortage of admirers. One was Schoenberg, for whom Wood was a ‘perfect musician, great educator, great benefactor of music, and most charming gentleman.’
Concerts don’t run without money, which is where Sir Edgar Speyer slips into the story of the Proms. When they began, the funding came from a surprisingly rich laryngologist whose money came with the requirement that everything be performed at lower than usual pitch (to prevent damaged voices), and that a fountain be installed in the promenading area to purify the air (the audiences smoked like chimneys).
But when in 1902 the money ran out, insolvency loomed. Things were only saved by Speyer, who came up with the present-day equivalent of £220,000 a year to underwrite the season.
Speyer’s money came from a family business whose interests included the creation of the Northern, Piccadilly and Bakerloo lines of the London Underground. He lived in a Mayfair mansion where he entertained the likes of Elgar, Grieg, Debussy and Strauss. But he was widely generous, helping to create the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London’s East End and part-funding Captain Scott’s ill-fated trip to Antarctica – for all of which he was rewarded with a baronetcy.
The only problem was his parentage: the Speyers were German, which didn’t bode well in World War I. Edgar was accused of spying, almost certainly without foundation, then hounded out of Britain. Whereupon the Proms fell into penury again – saved this time by the music publishers Chappell, who agreed in 1922 to underwrite them so long as the second half of each concert provided a platform for the popular ballads that Chappell sold as sheet music, a promotional deal that literally papered over an injustice.
Hubert Parry (1848-1918)
Parry’s music always featured in the Proms, but for more modern audiences his connection rests with one piece: Jerusalem, beloved of Last Night audiences, though their understanding of it is perhaps not quite what the composer planned.
He was a country-gentleman: Etonian, wealthy, living in a country pile in Gloucestershire, with all the makings of a model patriot. And the initial context for his song (it was a song, not a hymn) in 1916 was an unequivocally patriotic Queen’s Hall rally for an organisation called Fight for Right, set up to support the war effort.
But soon after the premiere Parry grew uncomfortable with Fight for Right and handed over his song to the Women’s Suffrage movement, with which he felt more sympathy. By then the song was orchestrated. But it had no Proms performance until 1942 and didn’t make it to a Last Night until 1953. Since then it’s surfaced with robust insistence every year.
Whether the singing audience give much thought to William Blake’s text is another matter. It’s ambiguous and could mean anything from an attack on the Established church (the real ‘Satanic Mills’ being cathedrals) to a celebration of free love (those ‘arrows of desire’). Blake was a radical free-thinker, not a member of the Women’s Institute. And Parry too turned out to be a liberal-progressive whose rejection of conventional Christianity would never have accommodated any hope to see the Lamb of God in England’s pleasant pastures.
Malcolm Sargent (1895-1967)
Adored by audiences and amateur musicians, Sargent brought undoubted glamour to the Proms, presiding over them as chief conductor for two decades (194867) with enormous popular appeal. But he was also a divisive figure.
Born into modest circumstances that few would have guessed from the aristocratic manner he assumed, he came to the attention of Henry Wood as a composer and was invited to conduct his own An Impression on a Windy Day at a Prom in 1921 (see p6). But the conducting turned out to be more impressive than the score, and a career was born.
He was a fine technician: confident, clear, ice-cool under pressure – not least during wartime concerts where he had a habit of encouraging his audience to stay put as the bombs dropped down. And he was lucky, conducting the last ever concert at Queen’s Hall on the afternoon of the day it was destroyed by an incendiary bomb.
All this made him famous, and he cultivated a profile – partly through the charismatic charm with which he drew nimble Messiahs from north-country choral societies, but also through the Proms’ Last Night, which he remodelled as a platform for himself. He actively encouraged the disorderly exuberance of the crowd, insisting that ‘if people get as enthusiastic about music as they do about football, it is all to the good.’
His players grew less enthusiastic, though, finding him aloof and shallow; and the sharp-cut suits and buttonhole carnations he wore perhaps endorse that view. But his nickname of ‘Flash Harry’ has an interesting ambivalence. Hostile or affectionate? Perhaps both.