The 115th season of the BBC Proms continues to bring the world's best classical music to increasingly wide audiences. Or at least, that's what the man in charge of the 2009 Proms, Roger Wright, says it does. That opening sentence is his, not mine, and it comes from Wright's own published overview of this summer's season, which starts on 17th July. But is it true? I have my doubts.
It is not my intention to knock the Proms. The Proms are wonderful. No other country has a festival to match them, especially at the price they charge. They are one of the best things in British cultural life. I'll defend them to the death, especially against the former so-called arts minister, Margaret Hodge, who launched a foolish and ill-informed assault on them last spring and happily lost her job shortly afterwards. The Proms matter. So what's the problem?
If you read the Proms prospectus—which, like the arrival of Wisden, is one of the joys of spring—it is hard not to be overwhelmed by the immensity, the scope and the excellence of it all. Every year there is more music than the year before. This year the Proms are the biggest ever: 100 concerts in all, with 76 consecutive events in the Albert Hall, 19 chamber music Proms, five Proms in the Park to coincide with the Last Night, and a further 70 related events like talks, workshops and films. This year there seem to be more themes than ever too—from the anniversaries of Purcell, Haydn, Handel and Mendelssohn to celebrations of Henry VIII, Darwin, MGM musicals, Bollywood and much else.
It is important not to overstate the case. The Proms are still centred on western classical music, as Wright says. It would be perverse to pretend otherwise. All the same, a slow, unobtrusive slippage is going on. Part of me sympathises with the need for this changing diet. The relative failure of the western tradition to renew itself in the second half of the 20th century means that most of the music at the core of the repertoire belongs ever more deeply to the past. That's not necessarily a bad thing. There is a space in the repertoire—and cultural diversity is filling it.
Yet—have a careful look at the 2009 Proms schedule. Examine, in particular, its absences and its relative absences, and you will see that it includes some very major ones indeed: nothing by Adès, Bernstein, Borodin, Boulez, Grieg, Hindemith, Martin, Monteverdi, Nielsen, Puccini, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stockhausen, Johann Strauss, Tippett, Verdi, Vivaldi, Walton, Weber, Webern or Weill. It is a striking list, 20 strong, and covers a very wide range of music. No Tchaikovsky symphonies either—when was that last the case on Kensington Gore?
I am particularly struck by the fate of Mozart in recent Proms seasons. Two years ago—admittedly the year after his 250th anniversary—not a single work by Mozart made it to the Albert Hall. In 2008, he was heard four times. This year the total is seven, yet for the second time in three years the Proms will not contain a single Mozart symphony. This amounts to marginalisation.
You can say, quite legitimately, that it has to be swings and roundabouts. Vaughan Williams, for example, enjoyed a feast in 2008, his anniversary year; inevitably 2009 is famine by comparison. You can't have everything all the time. But we do need Mozart all the time. It's not good enough to say Mozart doesn't work too well in the Albert Hall (although it is true). No one makes the same argument—nor should they—about Bach, Handel or Haydn. All are well represented in the 2009 schedule, though the acoustic is difficult for their music too.
Everyone will have their own view of a perfectly balanced Proms season or sequence of seasons. My own would search out more of the neglected works of the core composers, as well as their contemporaries, and would give greater priority to works that suit the Albert Hall. But the core composers would always be at the heart of the Proms. And I'm not confident enough that this is the case at the moment.
