Music unites us – so let’s stop politicising the Proms
Tomorrow night, the Proms will return at full capacity to the Royal Albert Hall, a sign of the arts coming into bloom. There is no doubt that this is a deeply emotional moment as we see an industry hobbled by the coronavirus pandemic slowly being brought back to life, and many freelancers who had been left to fall between the cracks with no financial safety net having a fighting chance of resurrecting brilliant careers that have been put on hiatus.
The audience, many of whom, like me, realise it’s the greatest classical music event in the world, will be supporting them, buoyed by a sense of national pride and a certain amount of relief. But earlier this week, Simon Rattle made a comment about the Proms which left me feeling depressed, as if someone had burst my party balloon.
Rattle told Radio Times that he avoided conducting the Last Night because he wanted to avoid its “jingoistic elements”, that nationalistic aspects left him “uneasy”. Of course, he is not the first conductor to have reservations about Rule, Britannia! and Land of Hope and Glory. Back in 1990, Mark Elder was due to conduct at the Last Night of the Proms when he suggested that the songs could whip up the wrong sort of sentiment at a point when the country was about to go to war with Iraq. In those very different times, Elder was summarily dismissed for his public misgivings.
Notoriously, the Proms cancelled the lyrics of both these songs last year only to reinstate them after heated debate (and threats to the conductor Dalia Stasevska who had wrongly been blamed in some quarters for being instrumental in the decision) – an unnecessary concession to cancel culture which now seems like a moment of madness from Proms executives.
Director of the BBC Proms, David
Pickard, and his team will no doubt have learnt to stay out of politics this time round and, in the light of Rattle’s comments, I feel sorry for them as they get ready for their grand opening. For they must realise that what your average Promenader doesn’t want is for politics to spoil their fun.
In my experience, they are a combination of hardcore musos, day-trippers delighting in the unique atmosphere and the odd celebrity (imagine my thrill when I sat next to David Attenborough, lost in a reverie somewhere amid the second movement of Sibelius’s Symphony No. 7). For all of us, the Proms is about the music and we don’t want to be reminded of the outside world the moment we enter the Royal Albert Hall.
My own relationship with the Proms stems back far before I ever started writing about the arts. During the 1980s, having been to primary school with no focus on classical music, it became a crucial part of my cultural education. I can still remember being mesmerised by Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 on TV, and then, oh joy of joys, actually visiting the Albert Hall a few years later and feeling that I was so close to violinist Tasmin Little (performing Dvořák) that I could reach out and touch the tip of her bow. For my love of classical music, for my introduction to a whole world of composers, soloists and orchestras (both home-grown and international), I have to thank the Proms. And politics has certainly never entered the equation. Sometimes the arts do need to be political, of course. Take theatre, for example, where the big issues of the moment are a crucial part of its ecosystem. But classical music can survive perfectly well in a sort of aesthetic and emotional bubble; it’s there for us to lose ourselves, to engage in quiet reflection, or conversely, to rouse us. Maybe the Finlandia suite will make us think about the country’s bid for independence from Russia at the end of the 19th century. But it seems unlikely.
And thus, fears over the connotations of the Last Night have always seemed rather ridiculous to me. How many audience members are
standing there seriously thinking about British superiority as they wave their flags (pride perhaps, there’s a crucial difference), wishing to be transported back to the days of imperial conquest? The darker side of nationalism, which some seem to think is implicit in the Last Night, has nothing to do with the Proms and only a troubled few would use the concert as a bolstering of their beliefs.
I feel like the hand-wringing comments of figures such as Rattle are a bit neurotic, constituting a sort of over-analysis of a harmless institution, rather like worrying whether there is enough choice for vegans at a teddy bear’s picnic.
The comments also raise the subject of whether musicians should ever be political. Someone like Rattle is obviously far more informed than your average pop star, but I feel as if they need to stay out of such matters. The fact is that music is, and always will be, a force for good – a sign of unification and not division – and modish anxieties only get in the way of its considerable power.
Indeed, the naysayers need to take note of the great Daniel Barenboim as someone who has broken down boundaries and, with his West Eastern Divan Orchestra, which unites talented young musicians from all over the Middle East, defuses the political and turns it into something beautiful. They say love conquers all, but music comes pretty close.