Henry Wood and the first Prom

Some institutions are founded with manifestos and marble. Others begin on a wet August evening, in a half-finished hall, with a young man checking the second hand of a pocket watch against the gas-lit dial above the green-room door. The grand cultural settlements of a nation are rarely declared. More often they are conducted into being by someone who walks down a corridor on time, lifts a baton, and trusts that the room will follow.

THE OPTICIAN'S SON

Henry Joseph Wood was born on the third of March 1869 above his father's shop at 389 Oxford Street, where lenses were ground and spectacles fitted for the West End trade. The father played the cello in the parlour after closing; the mother, Martha Morris, sang. The boy was set to the keyboard early, and by ten he was at the organ-loft of St Mary Aldermanbury. By sixteen he was a paid organist; by eighteen he was at the Royal Academy of Music studying with Prout and Macfarren. He was a high-Anglican-choir child of the 1870s, the All Saints', Margaret Street kind, raised on the cleanest cathedral lines and the most exact rhythm a precentor could enforce. The London he inherited treated orchestral music as a private possession of the carriage-trade. Covent Garden was for the Italian season. The Saturday Pops at St James's Hall were three-shilling affairs at the cheapest. The shilling that bought a working clerk an evening in the music-hall could not, in 1894, buy him an evening with Wagner.

THE QUEEN'S HALL

Robert Newman, lessee of the new Queen's Hall on the south side of Langham Place, was thirty-seven that summer, a former bass singer turned impresario, and not a sentimental man. He had taken Wood out to dinner in the spring of 1894 and put a proposition to him over the table. I am going to run nightly concerts and train the public by easy stages, Newman said, by Wood's own record in My Life of Music: popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music. The hall held two thousand five hundred. Newman meant to clear the stalls of seats and leave the floor open as a promenade. He meant to sell the floor at a shilling a head. He meant to allow the audience to walk, to smoke, to take refreshment during the music, after the manner of the Continental spa orchestras at Karlsbad and Marienbad. He meant to programme Wagner on the same evening as a Rossini aria and Rule Britannia, and trust the mixture. He needed a conductor who would not flinch.

THE TENTH OF AUGUST

The day came in close and grey, the London August of weak sun and high cloud. By six in the evening the queue along Langham Place was four deep and reached past the corner of Riding House Street. The hall doors opened at seven. The promenade filled in a quarter of an hour: clerks in serge, shop-assistants in their Saturday collars, music-students with the scores under their arms, a sprinkling of cabbies, a soldier or two from the Langham barracks, women in the cheaper hats. The balcony filled at three shillings. By twenty past seven the floor was packed to the platform rail and the side-aisles were standing.

In the green-room Wood laid the programme out on the table and read it through once more. The overture to Rienzi. Largo al factotum. The Mendelssohn E-minor. A Brahms Hungarian Dance. The Oberon overture. A Liszt rhapsody. Elgar's Imperial March, fresh from its first performance at the Crystal Palace four months before. Rule Britannia at the close. Twenty numbers, three hours, one interval. He set his pocket watch by the green-room clock.

A SECOND OF TIME IN HISTORY

There is a moment, before any first performance, when a young conductor understands what is being asked of him and what is being risked. Wood was twenty-six. He had conducted opera at the Lyceum and the Olympic; he had directed a touring Carl Rosa company in the provinces; he had drilled choirs since he was a schoolboy. None of that was this. The London audience had never been asked to behave as the audience at Karlsbad behaved. The London critic had never been asked to forgive Brahms next to a Strauss waltz on the same printed bill. The platform he was about to walk onto was wider than any he had stood on, and the room behind it would be the largest room of music-listeners assembled in the city that night. If the experiment failed, Newman's three thousand pounds would be lost by Michaelmas and the hall would revert to the recital trade. If it failed loudly, Wood himself, who had a wife to keep and a reputation just rising, would be the conductor who could not hold a London audience.

He could refuse nothing now. The men were already in the pit, tuning. What he could decide, in the corridor between the green-room and the platform door, was the tempo he would take the Rienzi at. Slow, in the German cathedral manner he had been taught, would dignify the evening and reassure the critics from The Times and the Musical Times. Brisk, almost theatrical, would catch the promenade. He thought of his father in the shop fitting a lens, turning it a quarter-turn for the focal length, watching the customer's face for the moment the world clarified. A quarter-turn brisker, then. The promenade was the customer. The Queen's Hall was the lens. He would not patronise the shilling floor with a lecture-tempo. He would play to them as if they had paid a guinea.

Newman put his head into the green-room at twenty-five past seven. Mr Wood, he said, by the conductor's later record, the house is full. The promenade is packed and there are people in the aisles. We are starting on time. Wood took out his watch, set it to the half-hour, and walked down the corridor.

THE OVERTURE

He came onto the platform to a roar from the floor that he had not expected and would never quite forget. The orchestra rose. He bowed once, turned, lifted the stick. The trumpet call of Rienzi opened the evening at thirty-two minutes past seven by the hall clock. The promenade was silent for the opening bars and then, when the strings came in, the silence held. He took it a fraction brisker than he had rehearsed. The men followed. The aria came next, then the concerto, and by the interval the floor was applauding between movements in the way the critics would deplore the next morning and the audience would never abandon. Elgar's march brought the floor to its feet. Rule Britannia closed the evening at half past ten. Newman counted the door-money in the office at eleven and found the house had taken near a hundred and twenty pounds on a hundred-pound nut.

THE BANKRUPT IMPRESARIO

Newman ran the season for seven years on his own credit and went bankrupt in 1902. He had been the architect; the architect was ruined by his building. The Chappell music-publishing firm took the concerts on, then Beecham's private money during the war, then in 1927 the British Broadcasting Corporation, which had been three years on the air and was looking for a cultural commission proportionate to the licence fee. The Proms became the BBC's. It was the Corporation's first sustained patronage of orchestral music in the country and, by the careful judgment of every later historian, the foundational act of its cultural mandate. Newman did not live to see it. He had died in 1926, a year too early, the year before the deed.

FORTY-NINE SEASONS

Wood conducted every season from 1895 until his death. He gave the English premières of Sibelius, Mahler, Schoenberg, Debussy, Scriabin, Janáček, Bartók. He raised the pitch of the British orchestra to international concert pitch in 1895; he was the first London conductor to admit women to the permanent strings, in 1913; he refused a knighthood in 1911 and accepted one only in 1911 when pressed, then a higher honour later. In the autumn of 1940 the Queen's Hall stood through the first Blitz; in May 1941 a single incendiary brought it down in a night, and the Proms moved to the Royal Albert Hall, where they have remained. He conducted the fiftieth season in the summer of 1944 from the evacuated Albert Hall platform, an old man with a bad heart, and died at Hitchin on the nineteenth of August, two weeks after the season closed. His ashes were laid at St Sepulchre's-without-Newgate, the musicians' church in the City, beneath a window given by the players.

The bust of Henry Wood that stood on the Queen's Hall platform stands now at the back of the Royal Albert Hall arena, behind the timpani. On the Last Night of the Proms in early September, by the instruction Wood left in his will of 1944, the leader of the orchestra carries a laurel chaplet from the bandstand and sets it on the bust's shoulders before the first note. The tradition has not been broken in eighty years. Six hundred thousand people now hear the season live each summer; ten million more listen on the broadcast the optician's son could not have imagined. The shilling promenade has become the largest classical festival in the world.

The institutions that last are seldom the ones declared into being. They are the ones a young man walks into on time, with the tempo already decided in the corridor. The lens is turned a quarter-turn brisker. The room comes into focus. The laurel waits at the back of the hall.