Read on to discover why the Proms queue is a place to meet friends... and even a new love!
The joy of the Proms queue
I’m not saying anyone should be delighted to be 114,327th in line, but on the day that tickets went on general sale for the BBC Proms, my heart soared to see there was such a massive number ahead of me in the online ticket queue. And why? Because I knew that I and 114,326 others were part of an exponentially longer line of Proms fans that stretches back to the inaugural summer of 1895, a queue that would reach the moon and back 117 times if everyone was stacked on top of one another. Providing they kept their hats on, that is.
The Proms has always aimed to be affordable for all
Today’s virtual queues are the latest expression of the Proms’s visionary musical democracy in action. That’s what motivated the conductor Henry Wood and impresario Robert Newman in the 1890s, when they were launching not just a new concert series, but a new orchestra for the recently opened Queen’s Hall. They designed the whole enterprise for audiences to appreciate the whole gamut of the artform, taking them on a journey through centuries of repertoire by seducing them through pot pourri programmes while also offering unadulterated classics as well as ‘novelties’ – the new pieces by living composers for whom Wood was such an ardent and unprejudiced champion in all of his seasons.
Proms tickets were available for a shilling a concert in 1895 if you took the best places in the Queen’s Hall to prom in the arena, where you could eat, drink and be merry while the music lasted. Wood and Newman knew that to get their simultaneously serious and populist mission off the ground, the Proms had to be as affordable as possible. And while yesterday’s shilling has become today’s eight pounds, the principle remains the same: the Proms are available to more people more reasonably than any other major concert series. After the season became the BBC Proms in 1927, the concerts weren’t just cheap, they were free for anyone to hear who has a radio.
The Proms queue has always been a place of camaraderie... and even love
But is today’s virtual queue the same as the cossetting queuing community of Prommers snaking around the Royal Albert Hall in those distant pre-digital seasons, with tents, sandwiches, sou’westers and everything else you needed for a summer’s night in the Last Night of the Proms queue? The Proms historian Leanne Langley wouldn’t have met her husband if they hadn’t been standing in line for the same concert, and their romance is just one of many that’s been sparked by classical music’s most enthusiastic ticket frenzy.
Romance may not happen in the same way in the virtual box office, of course, but the dividend of access and opportunity for everyone to be part of the Proms is surely worth it. As I write this column, there are still a handful of tickets available for the Vienna Philharmonic’s Bruckner Ninth Symphony in September – and what’s that? There’s no queue…
