The Proms

 2004, as ever before,  I was an odd, isolated, little duck, and yet maybe a little less than otherwise. I'd met my core college friends, the node from which I've still found best friends of my life, but still, a dude like me didn't feel much of a home anywhere, and certainly not a spiritual home. 

It was not even a given that a person like me could get his crap together to apply for a study abroad program. For a kid like me, the amount of hoops were staggering, and realistically speaking, with the amount organization that could go wrong, better a kid like me end up on a summer program than a semester or year-long one. 

It was still worse once I got there. The highs of London were so high, and yet the lows were so low. No particularly interesting person wanted to study in England. The smarter ones of course had a different language or craft or industry to practice in, so they went to Paris, Rome, Madrid, Moscow, Prague, Beijing, Brussels, Oxford, Delhi, Souel, Abu Dhabi, Buenos Aires, Vienna, even Oxford. 

I got an internship at the Association of British Orchestras, and for a learning disabled kid, every minute of it was horrible. The Brits were of course too polite to tell me straightforwardly how terrible I was at my job, but I knew exactly what they thought, and the stress led to near daily trips to cry in the bathroom. I don't know how bad you have to be to get a C on a meaningless work internship, but whatever I did, I was just that bad at it. 

The kids on that program were truly terrible, and they hated me like anything. Most of them were there to get drunk. They'd come home at 4 in the morning, shitfaced and loud, sometimes with women, and when they were asked to keep quiet: 'Hell no! We're here to have fun! What the fuck are you doing here?'

I was here to have fun too: the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert, the National Gallery and the Natural History Museum, Diana Rigg in Tennessee Williams, Jonathan Pryce and Eddie Redmayne in Edward Albee, Roger Allam and Conleth Hill in Michael Frayn, the Jerry Spring opera and Sweeney Todd in the best Sondheim production I ever expect to see - that's the West End for you. At Covent Garden, Britten's Peter Grimes conducted by Pappano and Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos conducted by Colin Davis.  Jose van Dam starring in Die Meistersinger at Royal Festival Hall and Bernard Haitink conducting Brahms at the Barbican. And best of all, Charles Mackerras conducting the Glagolitic Mass by Janacek, a night during which I must have wept through the whole performance. When I look back at some of the performers and actors I saw, I realize it was my one glimpse into a passing generation that I'd only read about in newspaper reviews and sighed with longing for would that I could be there.... If only I could have gotten back in time from a conference at a country manor in time to hear Mstislav Rostropovich conduct Shostakovich 5 or let myself see Kurt Masur too conduct the Glagolitic Mass! Those are two legends I will have missed in concert forever - though I met Rostropovich in a Tel Aviv hotel, at some point I'll tell that story... But the post-concert drink was ineitably alone, I might have felt sad, but I was sad at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese or the Lamb and Flag. 

By halfway through my time in London, I was broke three separate times and my parents reluctantly wired me money from Western Union, because were they really going to let their irresponsible child starve in an unfamiliar city? Even if he was going through it like water in the second-most expensive city in the world? And at the time, London was even quite a bit more expensive than it is now!

But the few nice people I met at work told me: just wait for the Proms! I'd heard about the Proms of course, every classical music nut in the world knows about them, but nothing could prepare me for them. Whatever was memorable in the concerts, and surely there was much memorable stuff - like the Chichester Psalms, Petrushka, and Ives 4 all on the same program, Birtwhistle's and Dallapiccola, Pierre Laurent Aimard doing the Ravel Piano Concerto, George Benjamin conducting Messiaen's Canyons to the Stars, Mariss Jansons and Gidon Kremer, Messiaen's Poemes Pour Mi, Britten's Curlew River in the kind of avant garde staging you never see in America except in a claustrophobic blackbox, and if only I hadn't gone to Scotland I could have seen Colin Davis do Britten's War Requiem - I'll never have seen Davis in concert..., and Jiri Behlolavek conduct Dvorak's Specter's Bride, and if only I could have stayed a couple more days in England, there would have been Osmo Vanska doing Sibelius 2, David Robertson conducting Messiaen's Turangalila, John Eliot Gardiner conducting the B-Minor Mass, Valery Gergiev conducting the Rite of Spring. Brendel and Dohnanyi doing the Emperor Concerto, and Simon Rattle conducting Das Rheingold. Oh, the opportunities missed, every year, then and since....

But ultimately, the great appeal of the Proms was not what I saw, but how we saw it. The Proms is not a concert like any other classical concert. It has certain things in common with rock concerts, but not much. However horrible Royal Albert Hall's acoustics, however sweltering that behemoth's heat, however difficult it is to stand, to find seats, to fill up a hall of six-to-ten thousand every night for two whole months! Proms is, quite simply, classical music in its ideal state: the world's most elite music, for everyone. 

At the time, the price for the cheapest ticket was 4 pounds. For those cheap standing room seats just beneath the stage of Royal Albert Hall, you stood among a crowd of people who were there not to be seen, but because they loved music. Eccentrics all of them as Brits are known to be, some of them garrulously friendly whom you engaged in all kinds of conversation, some of them truly with a nastiness only eccentrics can attain. I remember, after going to the lou at intermission one guy, who didn't speak English, who literally shoved me But when I returned to London in 2012, here's what I wrote about the experience of returning to the Proms, my favorite place in the world, for the first time: 

I was standing exactly four rows behind the conductor’s podium. And around me in that gallery was a panoply of ages, and at least half a dozen simultaneous conversations about classical music, all knowledgeable and completely audible. Two rows behind me was a young man talking up a beautiful woman and seemingly trying to impress her with his knowledge about Charles Mackerras’s career. One row behind me to my left was a man and a woman clearly on a date, both in their late fifties, and telling each other about the most memorable orchestral concerts they’ve seen in the last few years. In front of me was an older gentleman, telling an older lady about how Daniel Barenboim’s Beethoven stacked up to all the other Beethoven cycles he’d seen. My friend, The Harris, and I struck up a conversation with another guy there; in his fifties, my height and vaguely Jewish looking (we were the only two people there under five-and-a-half feet tall) and spoke about Barenboim for some minutes. Near me was a German couple in their thirties, and from whatever little German I have I picked up that they were very excited for the Boulez. Next to me was a still more beautiful woman than the other who seemed to have come to a Proms concert completely alone. Near me another guy, early twenties and looking like an American popped-collar frat boy, standing completely on his own. Another guy in his twenties stood alone, and was reading some sort of music book. Clearly the older generation seemed more knowledgeable on the whole, but here was a city where classical music still clearly has a future.

It was only at intermission that I worked up the nerve to do what I barely had the nerve to do eight years ago - I spoke to nearly all of them. The kid reading the music book was a doctoral fellow at Kings College in Medieval Literature who hated Wolfram von Eschenbach. The ‘jock’ was an enthusiastic amateur violinist who loved playing Beethoven in semi-pro orchestras. The beautiful girl standing alone was a French girl with barely any English, but she played Beethoven on the piano and wanted to hear the symphonies. The German couple were jazz music lovers who wanted to determine if Boulez sounded like free-jazz, or if free-jazz sounded like Boulez (they also gave me some delicious olives). Of the couple on the date, I learned that the guy had been going to the Proms every year for thirty years and had been going to concerts of the Liverpool Philharmonic since he was a child, and of the woman I learned that she has a personal, not musical, hatred of Roger Norrington.  

The Proms is the greatest music festival in the world. Period. There is nothing in any other genre in any city which compares to the coordination it takes to assemble a different orchestra from a different part of the world every night for two months in a venue that can house six-thousand people with standing room 5 pound tickets in the front of the hall. It is now in its 117th year, and the seasons show only signs of growing in size and scope - there’s even an additional chamber music festival now at Wigmore Hall.


In America, a festival like this is utterly unthinkable. In order for The Proms to happen, there needs to be a massive government subsidy from a national broadcasting organization (in this case the massively funded BBC) which thinks classical music is in itself a public good - and they therefore produce, distribute, and advertise the concerts throughout the entire world. The whole idea that classical music, or even music itself, is a public good would cause many Americans to laugh themselves senseless - and perhaps rightly so. There is very little evidence that much good is done for the public by putting a hundred or so classical concerts. But ultimately, that is why The Proms are so awesome. Artists thrive on risk, and the best art is neither made when artists have too little money nor a too stable source of income - neither situation inspires people in the arts to their best. What inspires them is that tenuous middle ground where the funding to survive can be taken away at any moment - and they therefore must beg, borrow, or steal the money they need to fulfill their dreams.

Many music lovers in the UK protest the fact that the Proms, and the organization who produces them, are being irredeemably dumbed down (how spoiled can you be?). But unlikely as it sounds, should the economy of Britain crumble to the ground tomorrow, what program will be hacked up first? The Proms or the National Health Service? Its the very fragileness of a festival like the Proms that makes it such a miracle. I’m not sure if I believe in God, but I believe in The Proms.

....So yesterday, we got the news that Royal Albert Hall may file for bankruptcy. People are calling for that acoustical behemoth to be raised to the ground. Even Royal Albert Hall's former chairman is saying that no bankruptcy is so deserved. For a hundred fifty years, nobody could ever defend Royal Albert Hall, but for nearly a hundred-twenty, Royal Albert has given us the Proms, and no other place on earth could do that. For a certain subset of musical obsessive, the Proms is the happiest place on Earth, and for this small possibility that the Proms be gone, it is as horrible to the mind as any genocide. Nothing like as actually horrible of course, but like all things which make life worth living, the things which we most value can disappear overnight, sacrificed to necessity's expedience as they must in moments of true crisis. But if something like the Proms disappears, all that remains is memory, and the memories of it will eventually die along with the people there to remember. Life is fragile, beauty is fleeting, but as the things die which make life worth living, so then, more gradually of course, does the motivation to continue life itself. The Proms has been nearly two months every year for the last hundred twenty. It is not out of the realm of possibility that no music festival in the history of the world in any genre has generated that amount of joy for that many people as the Proms has, and all the moreso in an age where radio broadcasts can transmit over the internet. For fifteen years, I've listened faithfully, in the years following that first experience of them, I listened to every.... single... broadcast..., and I still listen to many of them even now. It is a memory of how joyful life can be; if you try hard enough, if you sacrifice enough, if you endure the stressors and strains to live your best life. This year, there have barely been any Proms at all, and all that there have been was broadcast from an empty hall. Classical music as we once thought it, art as I've always conceived it, is clearly dying. Perhaps what takes its place will be just as meaningful and joyful, and even if it isn't as meaningful and joyful to me, there surely must exist millions out there for whom it is, and they can have what they love to celebrate it. But the fact that so much of the music I love is clearly passing on is a tragedy too, and I refuse to not be sad about it.