Ivan Hewett:
The origins of Proms staples such as ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘God Save the Queen’ are more nuanced than you might think, says Ivan Hewett
So now we know. After days of fevered speculation about whether the Proms would ditch the traditional Last Night, out of both altered circumstances due to Covid 19 (primarily the absence of a live audience) and an anxiety that patriotic songs with talk of slavery and empire are inappropriate in the year of Black Lives Matter, the line-up was announced last night.
With much that is traditional and indeed heart-stirring (the insertion of
Carousel’s You’ll Never Walk Alone will doubtless go down well) promised, there will be a key tweak to two of the big traditional crowd pleasers: there won’t be any singing along, even from the soloist of the night, Golda Schultz,
to either Land of Hope and Glory or
Rule, Britannia. They will be presented in orchestral versions only. And, with no live audience to rectify the matter, they will remain wordless. And it’s the words that provide the debate around this music. Thus, shorn of any controversy, it will exist in a form that can offend no one.
But is it right to take away the language of these period pieces? Or should they be seen through a historical lens and treated more indulgently? Is there a danger that by turning these songs into proxies for our current ideological battles we actually misread them?
The fact is that the stories behind these songs are far more nuanced than many people might think, as, too, are those behind the other great patriotic anthems of the night, Jerusalem and God Save the Queen, which have been programmed to be sung, as usual. Here’s a brief guide to the real meaning of the songs, their original purpose, and history.
Land of Hope and Glory
It’s appropriate that the big familiar tune in Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No1, eventually Land of Hope and
Glory, begins very quietly, more in reflectiveness than triumph. Elgar was no tub-thumping supporter of Empire, and he was ambivalent about having this melody, first heard at the Proms in 1901 and then used in the Coronation Ode for Edward VII the following year, turned into a patriotic hymn when the First World War broke out.
The war caused him terrible anguish, though it has to be admitted he was at least as concerned for the fate of military horses as he was for the men. So he was never very enthusiastic about the words that AC Benson fitted to his big melody, and actually begged for some other less grandly imperial words to be substituted for them. But by then it was too late: the public adored them, and Land of Hope and
Glory became a smash hit. The association with the Proms continued, and by the late Twenties it had become a Last Night fixture, though it was only with the televising of the Proms from 1947 onwards that the singalong became a visual spectacle as well, with balloons and silly hats.
Jerusalem
This is the most visionary and mysterious of the Last Night singalongs, because of the wonderful poem by William Blake at its heart. Did Blake really believe that Christ came to England with Joseph of Arimathea? And what are those “dark satanic mills” – a reference to the industrialisation that Blake abhorred, or to institutionalised religious “mills” of the Church of England? The apparent patriotism of the poem may also be only skin-deep. It could be read as a satire on the maniacal patriotism of England during the Napoleonic threat – something else Blake disliked.
Whatever the poem’s meaning, the music by Charles Hubert Parry, director of the Royal College of Music, noted symphonist and figurehead of the “English Musical Renaissance”, gives it a huge visionary grandeur. He composed it in 1916 at the request of Robert Bridges, who wanted a suitably patriotic hymn to “brace the spirit of the nation” as part of the Fight for Right campaign, which aimed to give the fight against the Germans a spiritual gloss. Parry obliged, but soon became uneasy with the bellicose stance of Fight for Right, and was about to withdraw the song entirely. Fortunately, Millicent Fawcett, a leading light in the Suffragette movement, asked Parry if the hymn could be used at a concert in support of female enfranchisement in 1918. The piece outgrew the connection with the suffragettes and became a perennial Proms favourite, thanks partly to Elgar’s grand arrangement; though this was a late arrival, not appearing at the Last Night until the Second World War.
Rule, Britannia
Rumbustious, pugnacious, and, as any soprano will tell you, horribly hard to sing, Rule, Britannia is the most obviously patriotic of all the Last Night favourites. It was composed by Thomas Arne in 1744 for a patriotic Masque on the subject of King Alfred, who fought off the Viking threat by building up the English navy.
The song became so popular that Handel quoted it in one of his own works the following year. The words touched a nerve because they chimed with the aspirations of mid-18thcentury Britain, which was poised to become a mercantile empire based on sea power.
The country was also constantly at loggerheads with France (which explains the reference in verse two to “haughty tyrants”, ie the absolutist monarchs of France). The threat was real, as is shown by the original first line with its all-important commas: “Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!” – meaning, if you don’t rule the waves, and fast, France will crush you. Although the comma in the title is generally regarded as correct these days, it disappeared in Victorian times, by which time Britain really did rule the waves, and Sargent’s arrangement made the song a Proms fixture from the late Forties onwards.
God Save the Queen
Some people find our national anthem a tad dull, and some even think the words sound a touch imperialist. But that’s just a later age reading back its preconceptions on to something that has nothing to do with empire. No one knows for sure who composed the words or the music, though both may stretch back to the 16th century. But we do know the combination had real incendiary power at a certain fraught moment in September 1745. England was then in a perilous situation. The Young Pretender, the grandson of James II also known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, was about to invade the country from Scotland and attempt to claim the throne from George II for his father, and London was on fire with patriotic fervour. At the Drury Lane Theatre, three members of the cast of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist performed an extra item. “God Bless our Noble King, God save great George our King,” they sang. The audience roared its approval, especially the lines in the second verse about “Scatter her enemies… frustrate their knavish tricks”.
The song became an instant hit, and was sung in theatres all over the country. In typically British fashion, it became the national anthem by degrees, unofficially, with no Royal Proclamation or act of parliament. Those lines in the second verse have since caused some worry, and over the past century they have been rewritten to make them less bellicose and more conciliatory. It was the very first piece to be played at the inaugural Prom, in 1895.
The live performances of the Proms 2020 begin on Friday