The BBC Proms is an eight-week festival of classical music held every summer at the Royal Albert Hall in London, with over seventy main concerts. It is the largest classical music festival in the world, and it was founded on a deliberately democratic idea.
Promenade concerts
The name comes from promenade — walking about. When Robert Newman founded the series in 1895, the plan was explicitly to bring classical music to people who could not afford a concert hall seat: informal, cheap, standing room, with a bar and permission to move around.
That survives. The arena floor is cleared of seating, and standing tickets cost a few pounds on the day. “Prommers” queue outside, come in and stand for the whole concert, and many return night after night through the season. It is the cheapest way to hear world-class orchestras anywhere.
Henry Wood
The conductor who ran the Proms for half a century and shaped them completely. His bust is placed on stage every year and garlanded on the Last Night. Wood programmed enormous quantities of new and unfamiliar music, introducing British audiences to composers they would otherwise never have heard, and the commitment to new work continues — several pieces are commissioned and premiered every season.
The Last Night
The final concert is unlike anything else in classical music. The first half is conventional; the second half collapses into a party. The audience brings flags, balloons, party poppers and increasingly elaborate hats, and joins in with a fixed sequence:
- Rule, Britannia!
- Land of Hope and Glory, to Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1
- Jerusalem, Parry’s setting of Blake
- Auld Lang Syne, sung with linked arms
- The national anthem
The Prommers have their own traditions — shouted call-and-response with the conductor, and a speech from the podium that is expected to be funny.
The argument about it
The Last Night’s patriotic songs are contested. Critics point out that Rule, Britannia! celebrates naval dominance and contains the line “Britons never will be slaves” at a time when Britain was heavily involved in the slave trade. Defenders regard the evening as knowing, self-mocking pageantry rather than nationalism.
In 2020 the BBC announced the pieces would be played without vocals, citing the pandemic’s effect on choir sizes; the resulting row was so fierce, and so quickly folded into a wider culture war, that the decision was reversed within days.
Proms in the Park
The Last Night is relayed to outdoor concerts in Hyde Park, Glasgow, Swansea and Belfast, with tens of thousands attending and the same flags and singing. Between the hall and the parks, it is one of the largest simultaneous musical events in the country.