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Music

Sounding the wrong note

Richard Cockett on the sentimental nonsense at the Last Night of the Proms

It is that time of year for the Last Night of the Proms again, when honest patriots don silly hats and make their way to the Albert Hall, while the rest of us politely avert our eyes. Elgar buffs mourn their hero's brief moment of madness when he set A.C. Benson's dismal lyric of 'Land of Hope and Glory' to music, and retreat to the comfort of the Cello Concerto, reassur- ing themselves that his true spirit was one of wistful melancholia rather than jingoistic fervour. Blake devotees just tear their hair out and pray that Jerusalem will come again to the green and pleasant fields of South Kensington and the Last Night will be no more.

It has become a commonplace to remark that the Last Night of the Proms is an anachronism, an embarrassing and pompous display of nostalgia for an imperial greatness which vanished long ago, at about the same time as the Queen's Hall, the original venue for the Proms, was reduced to rubble by a German bomb in 1941. During the last half hour of the final concert in a season which has lasted for months, and seen the performance of so much new and excellent music from all over the world, the Proms retreat into a shell of cultural recidivism, insular and parochial to the core, swathed in Union Jacks — the legacy, principally, of Sir Malcolm Sargeant.

Indeed, Colin Davis and the BBC, recognising the problem of the Last Night as long ago as 1969, tried to take 'Land of Hope and Glory' off the programme. The attempt was met by what is usually described as a 'popular outcry', and the song was swiftly restored. Perhaps half an hour's wallowing in mindless patriotism every year acts as a useful safety-valve.

No, what is more revealing and depress- ing about the Last Night of the Proms than its dim display of imperial nostalgia is the spectacle of cultural confusion and musical hyprocrisy, the traditional English pleasure of putting a good tune above the meaning of words. All the anthems in the second half of the programme are sung with the same enthusiasm and the same careless insouciance for the words. While many in the audience might be aware that by singing 'Land of Hope and Glory' they are celebrating the drama of imperial greatness that was played out long ago, fewer realise that by singing Blake's 'Jerusalem' with the very next breath they are also attacking all those patriotic, martial and imperial virtues that Elgar held dear. Such incongruity could only be possible in England, with our ability to suspend our critical faculties when confronted by hallowed public rituals of recent invention. For Blake is the main victim of the Proms, a radical poet plun- dered to provide the climax to an evening which he would have abhorred. If the Last Night of the Proms is to be retained in its present form, then it is Blake who should be spared, not Elgar. Blake's road to the last night of the Proms was very different from Elgar's; whereas Elgar self-conscious- ly created the mood of imperial bravado, Blake had no say in the matter. The con- version of Blake's verses from his poem 'Milton' into the hymn 'Jerusalem' is a good example of the art of cultural expro- priation which the English have always been so good at, carefully assimilating dis- sent into mainstream culture — after a decent lapse of time, of course. But by now, surely it is not too dangerous to learn what we are actually singing about.

As far as Elgar is concerned, he set out quite deliberately to compose, in his own words, `... a great work — a sort of nation- al thing, that my fellow Englishmen might take to themselves and love.' The result was 'Land of Hope and Glory'. The tune is from the trio section Pomp and Circum- stance March No. 1, which was first per- formed by Henry Wood's orchestra at the Proms in October 1901. As Wood recalled, 'People simply rose and yelled. I had to play it again — with the same result in fact, they refused to let me go on with the programme ... Merely to restore order I played the March a third time.' Elgar knew that he had a hit on his hands, and when he was asked to compose the music for a 'Coronation Ode' for Edward VII in 1902, he simply fitted the specially commissioned verses of A.C. Benson to the already famous tune from Pomp and Circumstance.

It created a fitting finale to an ode which even at the time was derided for its vulgari- ty. One of Elgar's closest friends and advis- ers, A. Jaeger, advised him to compose some fresh music, warning that simply fit- ting Benson's lyrics to the existing march would sound damn vulgar. Just try it. The effect is fatal.' But Elgar was a man very much in tune with the spirit of the age, and he knew that vulgarity was what patri- otic audiences wanted. When the new ode was first performed at a concert organised by Henry Wood in thanksgiving for the King's speedy recovery from an appendici- tis operation, the reception was rapturous, and Elgar was called to the platform five times.

Thereafter Elgar received the rewards for such musical devotion to the Crown in inverse proportion to the quality of his music; he died a Viscount and Master of the King's Music, but his reputation barely survived such musical immolations as the Masque, produced for the Royal Visit to India in 1912. In fact, as Elgar was half- aware, 'Land of Hope and Glory' was already an anachronism when it was writ- ten, a tribute to imperial glories that were already fading, and the composer, a Ger- manophile, felt squeamish at the fervour his anthem generated during the first world war.

But at least Elgar created a vulgar tune for a vulgar occasion; Blake was not even consulted. Blake had written 'Jerusalem' almost exactly a century before, in 1803, with exactly the opposite in mind. The long poem 'Milton', from which 'Jerusalem' was lifted, is an attack on not only the vainglo- rious nationalistic triumphalism of Elgar, but also the school of Benthamite rational- ism and political economy that was sweep- ing across the universities and schools of England in the first half of the 19th-Centu- ty. He also denounced the Established Church, the parasitical monarchy and the decadent aristocracy. So, in a very English way, 'Jerusalem' has ended up being sung as the principal anthem in the chapels of those self-same public schools and universi- ties. Blake wrote 'Jerusalem' at a time when London was being turned into an armed encampment to fight the Napoleon- ic Wars. The night sky was lit up by the furnaces of hundreds of workshops and small arms manufacturers and the Thames was blockaded by captured French warships to prevent a French raid. No won- der that a man of Blake's temperament must have wondered whether Jerusalem was ever 'builded here'.

To Blake, such war and destruction were the result of a fatal perversion of mental processes, the result of the triumph of mechanistic rationalistic thinking which came after industrialisation. The 'dark satanic mills' described the evil factories that churned out the iron and steel to fight the patriotic wars of his own day, but the mill was also a metaphor for that automated, mechanistic tradition of think- ing which was to reduce the best product of the public school to so many 'desiccated calculating machines', to borrow Nye Bevan's later description of Clement Attlee.

The person responsible for converting Blake into another prop for the theatre of Edwardian imperialism was a direct contemporary of Elgar's, the Poet Laureate Sir Robert Bridges. Unlike Elgar, who was always conscious of his humble origins, Bridges was an old Etonian; but like Elgar, he was an enthusiastic monarchist and imperialist. He was also a composer of dog- gerel in support of the Empire, and his partner in crime was usually his close friend and fellow Old Etonian, the compos- er Sir Hubert Parry. Together they were responsible for the 'Eton Memorial Ode', and Bridges reached his own personal nadir with the dreadful 'Britannia Victrif, written to commemorate the cessation of hostilities in 1918.

At the beginning of the first world war, Bridges was a co-founder of the Fight For Right movement, one of a number of pri- vately sponsored propaganda bodies for the British war effort in the absence of any offi- cial government initiatives. He wanted an anthem for the movement, and so he asked Parry to set 'Jerusalem' to music in 1916. Parry duly obliged, and then gave the piece to Dr Watford Davies to write the organ music. Orchestration was later provided by Elgar himself. Thus Blake's anti-militaristic, anti-imperialist poem was commissioned as an anthem for a patriotic pro-war move- ment. That the meaning of Blake's work could be so abused was a testimony to the pervading ignorance about Blake's work that existed at the time. Blake's slow re- emergence as a poet only began in the mid- 1920s with the publication in 1927 of Geoffrey Keynes's Nonesuch edition of Blake's collected writings. Like Elgar's tune, Parry's music to 'Jerusalem' also proved an instant success when it was played for the first time in 1918 at the Albert Hall at a Woman's Movement meet- ing. Mrs Fawcett was so impressed by the hymn's potential as an emotional rallying- cry that she adopted it as her own anthem, and to this day it is still sung at the Women's Institute. Blake's final humilia- tion was not to come until 1953, when 'Jerusalem' was first played as the finale at the Proms, in place of 'Rule, Britannia!'

It is perhaps too late to rescue 'Jerusalem' from the suffocating embrace of the public schools, but perhaps a start could be made at the Proms. If the Last Night is to remain in its present form, then Elgar is wholly appropriate But surely it's time to extract Blake from the clutches of Parry, Bridges and Elgar.

Richard Cockett's most recent book, Think- ing the Unthinkable: Think Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution is published by Harper Collins, price .£25.