Jenny Doctor and David Wright, editors
THE PROMS
A new history 320pp. Thames and Hudson. £24.95.
978 0 50051352 1
Any coverage of the Proms is usually accompanied by images of the flag-wavers of the Last Night. What a relief, then, to find that The Proms: A new history, edited by Jenny Doctor and David Wright, is not wrapped in a Last Night jacket, but features a cover photograph that could belong to any night. The bizarre rituals of the closing gala are given their space, but in the context of something much greater: the history of the world’s outstanding music festival.
There is a fuss whenever an attempt is made to change any aspect of the Proms, but in fact tradition does not play a great part in their history: only one thing has stayed the same since the first concert in 1895, and that is the large proportion of the audience who stand, inexpensively, where the best seats in the house would normally be. This brings a unique informality to the concerts – in the early years the audience would eat, smoke and walk around during the music – though the music itself has never been treated with anything but the greatest respect.
Robert Newman, the entrepreneur who took on the lease of the newly built Queen’s Hall in 1894 and then persuaded Henry Wood to start a concert series there, was concerned with more than making a profit. His aim was to build both an orchestra and an audience that would appreciate it, and his choice of conductor – Wood was in his twenties and inexperienced – fortuitously inspired. By 1902, however, Newman had bankrupted himself. The banker Edgar Speyer committed himself to underwriting the Proms, leaving Newman and Wood still in control, while the lease of the hall was taken on by the music publishers Chappell & Co. If Speyer’s motives were altruistic, Chappells’ decidedly were not, and the growing tension between the protagonists over the next three decades, complicated by Newman’s death in 1926, resulted in the takeover of the Proms by the BBC, in whose hands they have now been for eighty years.
What were the early Proms like? In the first place, they were long – at least three hours, even with encores discouraged. They tended to be in two distinct parts: a “serious” first half and a much lighter second, with solos (cornet solos a speciality) and songs with piano designed, to some extent, to take the pressure off the orchestra; rehearsal time was minimal (initially three rehearsals for each week of six concerts). New works – what Wood called “novelties” – were introduced from the start, where possible with the composer conducting. The concerts kept their original shape until well into the 1930s.
Frustratingly, The Proms: A new history gives us no early concert programmes (the first one listed is from 1970), but there are plenty of intriguing statistics. Nearly 2,400 performances of music by Wagner were given in the first twenty years of the Proms, a staggering average of 120 pieces per season, with Beethoven coming a poor second at just under 700. But Wood’s taste for the new is revealed by the 139 performances of Richard Strauss (including three of the Symphonia Domestica in 1905), and the less surprising 208 for Elgar. Schoenberg rates one, but the pioneering performance of the Five Orchestral Pieces in 1912, though hissed by the audience, did not not deter Wood from inviting Schoenberg to conduct the work himself, the following year, at the Queen’s Hall Symphony Concerts.
If it had not been for the BBC’s intervention in 1927, the Proms, with Newman dead, might well have gone under. Broadcasting, of course, lent a new perspective to the concerts, although the BBC Symphony Orchestra did not come into being until 1930 (we are told strangely little of the politics that must have been involved in the abandonment of the Queen’s Hall Orchestra, many of whose members jumped ship to join the BBCSO). John Reith’s policy, “to entertain, to interest, to enlighten”, mirrored Newman’s aspiration to “create a public for classical and modern music”, and the Proms, under their new aegis, continued to thrive. But the outbreak of war meant that the 1939 season was curtailed, and with the BBCSO evacuated to Bristol, the Royal Philharmonic Society temporarily took over the Proms’ administration, with Wood conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in 1940 and 1941.
The destruction of the Queen’s Hall in 1941 led to a move to the Royal Albert Hall; and with the return of the BBCSO in 1942, the pattern of the Proms as they exist today was established. Already, before Henry Wood’s death in 1944, other conductors had begun to take a major role – initially Adrian Boult and Basil Cameron – while the LSO and LPO began to share a load that was clearly too much for one orchestra to sustain. Although the team that had worked with Wood still existed, post-war, another conductor was needed to assume Wood’s leading role, and with Boult unwilling to take over without provision for adequate rehearsal, and Barbirolli firmly attached to the Hallé, the cup passed to Malcolm Sargent. Though he was hugely popular with the Prom audience, Sargent’s innate conservatism particularly frustrated one of the unsung heroes of the Proms, Julian Herbage, who had worked closely with Boult and continued to be largely responsible for artistic planning until the appointment of William Glock as Controller of Music in 1959.
We are now on familiar ground, and David Wright’s excellent portrayal of the Glock years is a vindication of his achievement. Glock was often reviled as an unremitting modernist, but Wood would have approved of his revitalizing catholicity of taste. His programmes were innovative without being iconoclastic, except to those too parochial to accept change, and he provided the model on which his successors have built: Robert Ponsonby, thoughtful and greatly underrated (the most memorable Prom I have attended, the all-night Indian concert of 1981, was of his devising); the ebullient showman, John Drummond, under whose guidance the Proms became thoroughly international; and, about to preside over his final year, Nicholas Kenyon, who has expanded the reach of the concerts in ways that could not have been foreseen, while retaining the values and principles that their legacy demands.
Jenny Doctor and David Wright have put together a team of writers whose insight into the Proms is refreshing. No doubt there were archival restraints which occasioned a lack of specifics in some areas, and statistics may in any case be anathema to publishers, but surely 112 seasons demand a few more programming details? What one is left with is a sense of almost serendipitous history, so that even the Last Night owes a debt to the unexpected double encore demanded by the audience for the first performance of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No 1 in 1901.
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Colin Matthews's Horn Concerto was played at the 2006 Proms.
