The Last Night of the Proms

The Last Night of the Proms

Like many ostensibly ancient British rituals and observances, the Promenade Concerts were founded - by the manager Robert Newman and by the young, aspiring orchestral conductor Henry J. Wood - towards the close of the nineteenth century, shortly after the Queen's Hall had opened as a new concert venue and event space in London in 1893. As such, they may be regarded as a classic instance of what is sometimes called 'invented tradition', where venerable antiquity is less in evidence than is often popularly supposed; and where change and adaptation are at least as important as continuity and survival, even though the former are often deftly disguised or mistakenly perceived as the latter (Wright, 1959, pp. 168).

This in turn means that there are many ways of writing the history of what have long been colloquially known as the 'Proms' (a word which has a very different connotation in Britain from its popular meaning in the United States), and there are many aspects of this remarkable series of concerts that deserve and require to have their histories written. From what economists call the 'supply side', any comprehensive account of the Proms mustencompass composers and compositions, orchestras and conductors, concerts and buildings, funders and sponsors, programmes and organizers. From what might be termed the 'demand side', the story of the Proms should be concerned with the audiences: with their numbers, motivation, social background, education, occupations, nationality, gender balance and ethnic mix; with their geographical location, whether in the concert hall in London, or elsewhere in Britain, or even across the seas and around the world; and with the varied and advancing technologies by which the Promenaders, or more distant listeners, viewers or spectators are reached - by live performance, via the wireless, through television, on the big screen, and so on (Seckerson, 2002, p. 725).

Thus regarded, the history of the Proms is an important, knotted, intricate, multi-faceted and many-stranded subject; and to make it even more complex and protean, these varied themes which constitute the supply and demand sides interconnect and interact in different ways and at different times, and each of them also has its own separate pace, tempo and chronology. In terms (for instance) of its performing space, the crucial dates in the history of the Proms were 1893 (when the Queen's Hall was opened) and 1941 (when it was destroyed and the concerts were relocated at the Albert Hall); but in terms of sponsorship and organization, the key dates were 1927 (when the B.B.C. first became involved) and 1942-4 (when the Corporation's commitment was reaffirmed and effectively became permanent). Moreover, the evolving 'supply' and production of the Proms, along with the developing 'demand' and audience for them, must be set in a broader historical and geographical context: namely the state and self-image of the nation in which the concerts have taken place uninterruptedly across a century and more. For clearly the imperial Britain in which Henry Wood's ...