I switched on my telly for only the third time this year on Saturday night and watched The Last Night of the Proms. It so happened that during the week I had read The Power of Music, How Music Connects Us All, by Sheku Kanneh-Mason (Viking 2025, Penguin 2026). He was BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2016, and later he himself actually played his cello on the Last Night of the Proms. I heard him play the Beethoven Triple Concerto in Glasgow along with Nicola Benedetti and Benjamin Grosvenor. I also heard him play the Elgar Concerto a few years ago at the Edinburgh Festival, and I remember my neighbour in the audience whispering to me, “He’s not quite ready for it”, which I thought was quite untrue. I think my neighbour just meant that he didn’t sound like Jacqueline du Pré.
The Power of Music is a powerful book, championing the importance of music in schools, not as an optional adjunct, but as a critical part of the curriculum. Young people should have access to musical instruments, and to tuition. This was music (sic) to my ears, as it echoed my own experience at school. I was given a viola, and taught very well by a viola player in the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. I was soon playing in orchestras with other players from all the Glasgow schools. So music really does connect us all.
The private schools understand this very well. You only need to look at the London Proms brochure, packed with ads for private schools promising a great musical education. Even the tin-eared, or the tone deaf, obsessed with useful acquaintance and material “advancement”, recognise, albeit obliquely, something of music’s power of communication; they would call it “networking”. But Sheku, who attended a state school in Nottingham, worries that classical music is becoming increasingly elitist.
He comes from a large family of quite extraordinary musical accomplishment. Given his multi-racial provenance, he remarks on the extreme unlikelihood of his own achievement. People who play classical music, he says, don’t look like him.
So I was particularly interested to read his take on the Last Night of the Proms. When he appeared on Desert Island Discs, he told Lauren Laverne that he thought Rule Britannia! should be dumped. It’s music of Empire, jingoistic. He got a lot of stick for saying that. You can imagine the sort of remarks that were passed on social media. But the notion got some traction and for a time it looked as if the traditional bill of fare that ends the Proms would be changed. But there was a backlash, and, for better or worse, things remain as they were. It’s interesting how opinionated people are. Quite a lot of people have said to me, “Oh, I’m not listening to that! It’s so imperialist.” Yesterday, somebody I was speaking to actually called it “Trumpian”. I’m not sure if Trump has ever ventured an opinion on the programme for the Last Night of the Proms. I dare say he might consider any change to be “woke”; but you never know.
I thought I would examine the case for, or against, Rule, Britannia!, from first principles. Interestingly, the words were penned by a Scotsman, one James Thomson (1700 – 1748) from Roxburghshire. He was educated at Jedburgh School and the University of Edinburgh, where he studied Divinity. But he quit in 1725, went to London, and became a poet. He collaborated with his friend David Molloch on The Masque of Alfred (1740), for which he wrote Rule, Britannia!.
The music is by the English composer Thomas Arne (1710 – 1778). Rule, Britannia! is his best known melody. It certainly caught on. Handel used the tune in his Occasional Overture. Beethoven wrote a set of piano variations on it in 1803, and it appears in his Wellingtons Sieg (1813). Alexander Mackenzie, and Wagner, based overtures upon it.
Apart from the fact that it’s a great melody, you can see why Beethoven might have been attracted to it. He did after all gouge out the name of Napoleon from the title page of his Eroica Symphony, when Napoleon declared himself Emperor.
Anyway, here it is, complete and unabridged:
When Britain first, at Heaven’s command
Arose from out the azure main;
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sung this strain:
“Rule, Britannia! Rule the waves:
“Britons never will be slaves.”
The nations not so blest as thee,
Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall;
While thou shalt flourish great and free,
The dread and envy of them all.
“Rule…” etc
Still more majestic shalt thou rise,
More dreadful, from each foreign stroke;
As the loud blast that tears the skies,
Serves but to root thy native oak.
“Rule…” etc
Thee haughty tyrants ne’er shall tame:
All their attempts to bend thee down,
Will but arouse thy generous flame;
But work their woe, and thy renown.
“Rule…” etc
To thee belongs the rural reign;
Thy cities shall with commerce shine
All thine shall be the subject main,
And every shore it circles thine.
“Rule…” etc
The Muses, still with freedom found,
Shall to thy happy coast repair;
Blest Isle! With matchless beauty crown’d,
And manly hearts to guard the fair.
“Rule…” etc.
I will resist the urge to analyse the poem line by line. But arguably, it is a panegyric to freedom, and against tyranny. It’s not Shakespeare, though there is a Shakespearian echo in “Blest Isle!” Remember, “this scepter’d isle.” It’s self-consciously high flown, a bit perfumed. I think I’d prefer “blue sea” to “azure main”. Nowadays it tends to be sung, at the Last Night, if not exactly with a sense of irony, certainly in inverted commas. It is a piece of history from the eighteenth century. On Saturday night, the tenor Nicky Spence, like Thomson, himself a Scotsman, hammed it up in suitably camp fashion.
Well, we either keep it in, or we throw it out. The one thing I’m quite sure we should not do is change it. Don’t, for heaven’s sake, let the “sensitivity readers” get their hands on it.
Is there an association between the Last Night of the Proms and people uniformly in black, wearing balaclavas, prowling the streets of Dover and Portsmouth?
You decide.
jamescalumcampbell 