The Proms
The world's biggest classical music festival began as a plan to get ordinary people into concert halls, and you can still stand for hours in the Albert Hall's arena for next to nothing.
Published
Quick Facts
- First concert
- 10 August 1895, Queen's Hall, London
- Founders
- Impresario Robert Newman and conductor Henry Wood
- Home since 1941
- Royal Albert Hall, Kensington
- BBC involvement
- Took over in 1927; resumed responsibility in 1942 after private sponsorship carried the festival through the early war years
- Season
- Roughly eight weeks from mid-July to mid-September
- The name
- From 'promenade' concerts, where the audience once strolled about
- Signature finale
- The Last Night, with Jerusalem, Land of Hope and Glory and Auld Lang Syne
- Famous standing places
- The arena floor and the gallery, sold on the day
The shilling plan that saved classical music
The Proms began with a gamble. In 1895 Robert Newman, manager of the new Queen's Hall near Oxford Circus, wanted to fill his hall in summer. He hired a young conductor called Henry Wood and offered concerts that were cheap, informal and long on tunes. The name came from the old pleasure gardens, where audiences wandered about while the music played. At the Queen's Hall, the floor was left clear for standing, and people could smoke while they listened. It worked. Wood trained an orchestra, built the audience and ran the show for nearly fifty years. Beethoven nights and Wagner nights became fixtures, and Wood introduced London to a good deal of new music, including Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces in 1912.
How the BBC rescued a festival and the Blitz moved it
By the mid-1920s the Proms were in financial trouble. In 1927 the young BBC stepped in, which is why radio has always been central to the festival. Then came the war. The BBC withdrew its support in 1939, and private sponsorship kept the concerts going until the BBC took responsibility again in 1942. In May 1941 German bombs destroyed the Queen's Hall, and the Proms might have ended with it. Instead they moved to the Royal Albert Hall, which has been their home ever since. Wood died in 1944, just after celebrating his Jubilee season. Today a bust of him sits on the Albert Hall stage, and on the Last Night it is wreathed in flowers.
Promming: the art of standing for hours
Prommers are the people who stand in the arena in front of the stage or in the gallery high above it. Tickets for these places are sold on the day, which means queues, folding stools and a lot of conversation with strangers. Prommers have their own customs. They cheer when the piano is wheeled on, and they have long made a ritual of the lid being raised. The chatter in the queue is as much a part of the evening as the music. The programme mixes orchestral classics with premieres, film scores, jazz and world music. Most concerts take place at the Royal Albert Hall, while other Proms are held at venues elsewhere in the UK, including The Glasshouse in Gateshead.
The Last Night, flags and all
The final concert is the one most people have seen on television. It has a loose running order: Henry Wood's Fantasia on British Sea-Songs, written in 1905 for the Trafalgar centenary, then Elgar's Land of Hope and Glory, Parry's Jerusalem and Auld Lang Syne. The audience joins in, waves flags and blows party horns. It has not been only a London celebration. Proms in the Park events once linked the Last Night to Hyde Park, Glasgow, Belfast and Swansea, with crowds watching on big screens. The BBC held them for the last time in 2019. The tone can change when the world does. In 2001, after the September 11 attacks, the Last Night included Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings. In 2020 the concert went ahead in an empty hall, and the debate about Rule, Britannia! made the news.
Why it still matters
The Proms still keep Newman's original idea: great music should not belong only to people in evening dress. A seat in the stalls is a different experience from the arena floor, but both hear the same orchestra. The festival has grown to more than seventy concerts, many broadcast live on radio and television, so people who will never set foot in the Albert Hall can still take part. It is probably the only place where a symphony premiere, a film-music night and a crowd singing Jerusalem all belong to the same programme.
Notable people
- Robert Newman
- Henry Wood
- Edward Elgar
- Hubert Parry
- Malcolm Sargent
- Leonard Slatkin
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