Memories of the Proms: on Beethoven’s Ode to Joy

For me it’s still summertime. That’s nothing to do with the weather, even if meteorologists’ autumn began on 1 September. Nor is it to do with the nights drawing in - astronomers’ autumn arrives with the equinox in three weeks’ time. No, I define summer by the Proms. For as long as there are nightly concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, broadcast on Radio 3, as far as I’m concerned it’s summer. The last night of the Proms this year is on 14 September. So my autumn begins the next day. 

I started going to the Promenade Concerts when I was a teenager living in London. I’d learned to love live music through the Robert Mayer Children’s Concerts that used to take place on Saturday mornings at the Festival Hall in the 1950s and 60s. The programmes included a good deal of twentieth century music that was new to this young audience. An electrifying performance of Walton’s Portsmouth Point Overture stands out in my memory, I can also remember being awed by Ralph Vaughan Williams, who must have been in the last year of his life, coming on to the stage to be applauded after a performance of one of his works - maybe his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis or The Lark Ascending.

My memories of the Proms are many. At the Albert Hall I heard for the first time so much of the music that’s stayed with me all my life. It was an irreplaceable introduction to the canon of the greatest baroque, classical and romantic orchestral works, and the choral repertoire too, for my piano teacher sang with the BBC Choral Society and used to distribute free Proms tickets to her lucky  pupils. 

Not all my Proms memories are musical. As I look back to the 1960s, it’s a heady concoction of teenage recollections that come into my mind. There was the frisson of taking girls to the concerts (will I ever hear Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony without the mental image of...well, it would be indiscreet to say any more). Then there was my coming to a conscious Christian faith during those years, which gave the sacred music I heard at the Proms particular significance: Haydn’s Creation, for example, and Bach’s Mass in B Minor. And one evening, queuing with my friends outside the Albert Hall, suffering an attack of tachycardia and wondering if my wildly beating heart would ever return to normal, or whether I was destined to die on a pavement in South Kensington. If only I could remember what music was performed that evening. I wonder why I’ve forgotten.

There’s one piece of music that I overwhelmingly associate with the Proms, and which I used to  return to year after year. This was Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the Choral. In those days, this mighty work was always performed on the penultimate night of the season, the final Friday evening. Some of the other music I heard at the Proms I’d already got to know through listening to my parents’ LP collection at home. But the Ninth was not to be found there. Of the Beethoven symphonies, they had only the Third (Eroica) and the Eighth, whose opening theme had been adopted by them as their personal “call sign”. All the others I discovered in the Royal Albert Hall. Including the immortal Ninth.

The symphony made an extraordinary impression on me. It felt like a miraculous achievement, music that seemed to transcend the ordinary world by speaking from another realm entirely. Even today, I don’t know of any other work that has such an arresting opening as the Ninth. It begins with a shimmering whisper that initiates one of the greatest crescendos in all of music culminating in the dramatic statement of the opening theme. You know, if the performance is up to it (which it always was at the Proms), that this is going to be a uniquely powerful experience. It never failed to move me then. It never fails to move me now.

The final, choral, movement is, of course, Beethoven’s setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy. In those days, the words and music had not yet acquired the European associations they now have: it was only in 1972 that the Council of Europe, in an inspired decision, adopted it as the anthem of Europe. But you could hardly listen to it without catching the optimistic spirit of Enlightenment internationalism. Alle Menschen werden Brüder wrote Schiller in a text clearly endorsed with enthusiasm by Beethoven in his ecstatic music, “all humanity will be brothers and sisters”. It was a powerful message in the era of the Cold War when we were living with the recent memory of the Cuba Missile Crisis in 1962.

I think I glimpsed on those Friday nights at the Proms the capacity of great music to forge people together in a community that, for a while, can transcend us. Beethoven’s Ninth seemed to epitomise a global vision of peace, freedom and happiness that we could all endorse. In a recent book, the renowned pianist Stephen Hough describes the Proms as “the greatest music festival in the world”. In Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More, he says: “the Proms has an important social function. We should not take for granted music’s extraordinary power to unite, that spell of solidarity when over six thousand people are moved as if by one heart.” Yes, I thought as I read those words, I recognise that experience. 

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is still performed every year at the Proms. But sadly, no longer on that last Friday night of the season. That evening always felt to me like a summing up of all the glorious music we had enjoyed over the summer, a final spiritual statement of human aspiration and joy before the more playful fun and games of the last night. When the Ninth made its annual appearance and heralded the end of another Proms season, the Albert Hall seemed like a holy place. Can’t we have that Friday evening ceremony back, please?

No matter if not. The Ninth will always be one of those universal works of art that are emblematic of our human longings and hopes. It touches our souls at the most profound of levels. It holds out a vision of life together as one human family. It inspires us to go on praying and working for a world in which we are at peace with one another. It urges us and encourages us never to give up in the pursuit of that joyful vision. Joy, it says, transforms everything. And joy will have the last word.  

Which is why, when you phone me, what I’ll hear on my mobile is the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the Ode to Joy. If I don’t answer straight away, don’t hang up. I’m simply enjoying the music.