I know I tend to blather on about the absurdities of political correctness, but once again I can’t contain myself from reporting on another mindless foray by the PC brigade.
Recently the BBC’s propaganda department has been in emergency mode, something this overworked subdivision of the British national broadcaster has become
quite accustomed to since the dreadful populist, Greg Dyke, took over the reins of “Auntie”, to give the Beeb its more affectionate nickname.
But this time it isn’t Dyke who has been causing the furore, but one Leonard Slatkin, an American who is currently chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. What Slatkin has done is being regarded as something akin to sedition in that he’s decided, on little more than his own whim, to put paid to long-standing tradition. This has to do with the performance of patriotic British songs at the final night of the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts and which pieces Slatkin has decided he doesn’t want to conduct.
The “Proms” is an annual event, a two week season of nightly concerts performed in London’s Royal Albert Hall and for which the prices of admission are, by today’s standards, ludicrously low. The avowed purpose of the Proms was to make fine music available to more people. Its immense success over the years is proof of the idea’s merits.
The final night of the Proms is more party than concert and the programme invariably includes one of the popular piano concertos and a few other regulars. The evening ends with the playing and singing along of three “traditional” standards in Rule Britannia, Jerusalem and Land of Hope and Glory, the words set to music from Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance suite. Slatkin has decided that he was “not comfortable” with Rule Britannia as its words were “outdated” and “militaristic”. He added a somewhat meaningless justification: “Though it’s wonderful to celebrate who you are and have faith in your country, I don’t think we should exclude others.”
Adopting a fine hypocritical stance, Slatkin went on to say that he would agree to conduct the original instrumental version of Rule Britannia, from Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs and from which the song was extrapolated. If Slatkin feels so strongly about the piece, one wonders why he agrees to conduct it in any form?
Not that the BBC’s contribution was much better in the way of logic. After denying only a couple of months ago that Rule Britannia was to be jettisoned, Nicholas Kenyon, the BBC’s Proms supremo, latterly was to say that the programme was reverting to the original instrumental version of Rule Britannia. Writing in the Financial Times, music critic Andrew Clark said that, “trying to justify a purely orchestral Rule Britannia on the grounds that it is the original version is typical of the spurious authenticity that has swept the musical landscape these last 10 years with Kenyon one of its prime promoters”.
Last year, of course, all three traditional songs were dropped from the final night of the Proms in deference to the September 11 tragedy but, as is being argued strenuously by Slatkin’s detractors, this hardly can be used as a future excuse for depriving the last night of the Proms of its eccentric English character. What would the reaction be in the United States if, on a similar occasion, a British conductor refused to perform the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which occupies equally as “militaristic” and “outdated” a niche in the American patriotic mind?
That Slatkin has proved himself to be seriously out of touch with long-inscribed English traditions was recently shown in the quite extraordinary public enthusiasms attending the recent Golden Jubilee celebrations of Queen Elizabeth. A million people crowded round Buckingham Palace and up the Mall to sing Land of Hope and Glory, wave Union Jacks and revel in unabashed patriotism. Slatkin’s pathetic attempts to deprive the last night of the Proms of its unique Englishness are not only self-defeating, but ignore, if not purposefully insult ingrained establishments of the British national subconscious. What next? Will maestro Slatkin ban God Save the Queen?
Whatever the arguments, the whole dreary shilly-shally over these three harmless songs is yet more evidence of a subversive invasion of long-established emotional conventions, the rituals and ceremonies that help make up a nation’s character. The aggressors are, as expected, the vindictive stormtroopers of political correctness. Whatever else these paralysing brutes might wish to destroy it is perhaps their killjoy instincts that are the worst. I was lucky enough in my BBC days to be the World Service presenter at a last night of the Proms and the event will remain one of the most wonderful evenings I have ever spent: in the company of a more than 5 000 flag-waving, bunting-shaking, streamer-throwing crowd, every one of them bursting with the happy enthusiasm of the event.
By most reports Leonard Slatkin isn’t a very good conductor. His season with the BBC symphony orchestra has been one of insipidness. Music for the sake of enjoyment, be it inoffensively patriotic or not, is clearly not one of his priorities. But then exhilaration has always been anathema to PC’s grim platoons.
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