Wood · 1895
Henry Wood and the first Prom
On the evening of Saturday the tenth of August 1895, in the newly built Queen's Hall on Langham Place in central London, the impresario Robert Newman, thirty-seven years old, the lessee of the hall and the founder of a small private concert agency, presented the first concert of his experimental *Promenade Concerts* series. The orchestral programme was conducted by a twenty-six-year-old former boy-soprano of the All Saints', Margaret Street choir, Henry Joseph Wood, recently returned from a season of musical-direction at the Lyceum theatre on Wellington Street. Newman's innovation was a set of three principles: pit-of-the-hall cleared of seats to provide a promenade arena for low-cost cheap-ticket audiences; relaxed conventions of the seated concert (smoking, eating, drinking, and walking-about during the music permitted in the promenade arena); mixed programmes pairing serious orchestral repertoire (Wagner, Beethoven, Brahms) with light-music encores. The eight-week first season ran from the tenth of August to the twenty-fifth of October 1895, with about sixty concerts; the cheap-ticket audience averaged about a thousand per evening. The Proms continued under Wood's direction for the next forty-nine years (until his death in 1944); the BBC took over the financial-backing of the festival in 1927 (the BBC's first major patronage of classical music in the country). The season of the BBC Proms (now eight weeks of mostly-nightly orchestral concerts at the Royal Albert Hall from mid-July to the second Saturday of September) remains in 2025 the largest classical-music festival in the world by audience-numbers, with about six hundred thousand live attendees and a global BBC broadcast audience of about ten million.
It is twenty past seven on the evening of Saturday the tenth of August 1895, in the green-room of the newly built Queen's Hall on the south side of Langham Place at the top of Regent Street in central London, in late summer light through the high north window. He is twenty-six years old. He is Henry Joseph Wood, born at 389 Oxford Street on the third of March 1869, son of the optician Henry Joseph Wood the elder and Martha Morris, a former boy-soprano of the All Saints' Margaret Street choir (the high-Anglican-musical-revival church of the 1860s), a organist at sixteen, in his seventh year of professional musical-conducting work since the 1888 commission at the Lyceum.
On the table in front of him is the printed programme for the evening: the overture to Wagner's Rienzi, the aria Largo al factotum from Rossini's Barber of Seville, a Mendelssohn violin concerto, a Brahms Hungarian Dance, the overture to Weber's Oberon, a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody, an Elgar Imperial March, and a closing rendition of Rule Britannia. The programme is twenty pieces over three hours, with a intermission for refreshments.
He thinks: the hall holds, on the promenade-area-and-seated-balcony combined, about two thousand five hundred. The cheap shilling-tickets for the promenade have, by Newman's pre-sale, sold about a thousand. The seated balcony has, on the three-shilling tickets, about eight hundred. The house tonight will be about eighteen hundred.
He thinks: Newman's three principles are: a cleared promenade for the cheap-ticket audience; relaxed conventions (smoking, eating, drinking, walking in the promenade allowed during the music); and mixed programmes pairing serious orchestral repertoire with light-music encores. The principles are, in plain reading, the Continental-spa-orchestra model of the Karlsbad-and-Marienbad German watering-places, transplanted to the London urban-middle-class concert audience.
He thinks: the question is whether the London audience will accept the relaxed conventions in a hall the size of Queen's Hall. The Continental spa orchestras play in three-hundred-seat pavilions. Queen's Hall is the largest concert hall in London after the Royal Albert Hall.
Newman comes into the green-room at twenty-five past seven and says, in the impresario's voice: Mr Wood, the house is full. The promenade is packed and there are people in the aisles. We are starting on time. Wood, by his later memoir My Life of Music (1938), takes out his pocket watch, sets it to the half-hour, and walks down the corridor to the orchestra pit.
The first Prom of the Newman-Wood series began at half past seven on the tenth of August 1895 with the overture to Rienzi. The eight-week season ran sixty-one concerts to the twenty-fifth of October 1895. The Newman concert-agency, which had financed the first season on a private loan of three thousand pounds, broke even by the final week and made a profit on the 1896 season. The Proms continued under Newman's financial-management until his bankruptcy in 1902, after which they were taken over successively by the Chappell music-publishing firm (1902–14), Sir Thomas Beecham's private money during the war years (1915–18), and finally by the BBC (1927 onward). The BBC's 1927 acquisition of the financial-backing of the Proms was the Corporation's first major patronage of classical music in the country and is, by every careful judgment of British twentieth-century musical history, the foundational act of the modern BBC's cultural mandate.
Henry Wood conducted the Proms continuously from 1895 to his death on the nineteenth of August 1944. He had conducted the fiftieth Proms season in the evacuated Royal Albert Hall (Queen's Hall had been destroyed by a 1941 incendiary bomb; the Proms had moved to the Royal Albert Hall in 1941, where they have remained) two weeks before his death. He is buried at St Sepulchre's-without-Newgate in central London, the musicians' church. The bust of Henry Wood at the back of the Royal Albert Hall orchestra-pit is, on every Last Night of the Proms in early September, garlanded by the orchestra leader during the pre-concert ceremony, by Wood's own instruction left in his 1944 will. The tradition is unbroken since 1944.