This is the story of the past 100 years in Britain
as you've never heard it before -
told through our love of classical music.
It's been the soundtrack to a century of extraordinary change,
from some of the biggest events in our history
to our shared ambitions and private passions.
In the midst of all this, classical music has been there for us,
reflecting and shaping Britain,
bringing us comfort, solace and joy.
And I think more than rock and pop, jazz or folk,
it is the drama, the emotion, the scale of classical music
that has truly brought us together at the key moments in our history.
Throughout this series, I'll meet some of our favourite musical stars
to discover how classical music held up a mirror to our hopes and dreams
and won its place in the soul of the nation.
What I'm doing is still touching people out there,
which is the most you could ask for.
In this episode, I'll explore how our relationship to classical music
changed dramatically in the period between two coronations
separated by conflict.
I'll be joined by John Simpson, the BBC's world affairs correspondent.
There's a sniper just above our heads.
Everywhere I've been, all those wars and revolutions,
I carried this with me.
It's got every single piece of classic music
that I would ever want to listen to.
Together, we'll discover how classical music
came to the nation's aid during the Second World War.
How it raised morale.
We were all moved and transported by it.
Helped us resist.
It must have made everybody feel very...proud and very British.
BIG BEN CHIMES
And how, once the fighting stopped and peace came,
classical music led the way,
helping to forge a bright new British future.
This was our classical century.
MUSIC: The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra by Benjamin Britten
This is where one of our most famous pieces of classical music
had its grand unveiling over 80 years ago.
MUSIC: Crown Imperial by William Walton
Crown Imperial was written by William Walton
for the coronation of George VI
here at Westminster Abbey in 1937.
MUSIC: Crown Imperial by William Walton
It's music to make you stand a little bit straighter.
It's confident, it's imperious,
it's very British.
CHEERING
The Royal Family had endured a rocky few years.
The abdication of Edward, the man who was supposed to be king,
had destabilised the monarchy.
This coronation was all about showing it was business as usual.
And music would play its part.
ALL: God save the king!
God save the king!
William Walton was asked for a piece of music that would exude
the pomp, circumstance and grandeur of Edward Elgar.
This was a turn of events for Walton, who had made his name
writing music for a rather different family from the Windsors -
the Sitwells, and they were a rum bunch of eccentrics.
"The Sitwells were always full of ideas," said William Walton.
"Some of which were really strange."
MUSIC: Mariner Man by William Walton
# "What are you staring at, mariner man
# Wrinkled as sea-sand and old as the sea?"
# "Those trains will run over their tails if they can
# "Snorting and sporting like porpoises.
# "Flee
# "The burly, the whirligig wheels of the train
# "As round as the world and as large again
# "Running half the way over to Babylon,
# "Down through fields of clover to gay Troy town
# "A-puffing their smoke as grey as the curl
# "On my forehead as wrinkled as sands of the sea
# "But what can that matter to you, my girl?
# "And what can that matter to me?" #
Called Facade, William Walton's music accompanied
unconventional poetry by Edith Sitwell.
Edith, along with her brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell,
were leading lights on London's artistic circuit in the 1920s.
Left-field wealthy aristocrats,
they befriended the penniless William Walton and roped him into
shaking up an art scene they saw as distinctly old-fashioned.
I've never seen Facade performed.
I've heard it before, but it is a very strange beast.
How would you describe what it is?
It is an early version of rap.
It doesn't sound like modern rap but the component parts are there.
So it's this beautiful fusion of music and words
but it has to be seen to be believed, really.
How much do we know about the earliest performances of this?
The first performance was in the drawing room.
There was a curtain design behind which the band would hide
and this singerphone, which is an elongated version of a megaphone,
appeared through that curtain.
Then the decision was made to perform Facade in public.
That performance was a bit of a shambles.
Certainly, the press coverage was pretty damning.
I think the Mirror wrote that it was "Drivel they paid to hear".
What is it in the music that you hear
that sort of makes you sense that Walton
was going to become a great composer?
What Walton has is this extraordinary capacity
to conjure up little musical moments
that from nowhere, within seconds, create an atmosphere.
MUSIC: Mariner Man by William Walton
William Walton and Edith Sitwell set out deliberately
to shock audiences with their "dining room entertainment",
as they called it.
Written in the '20s, Facade was a fusion of music hall parody,
jazz age fun and performance poetry.
It was so modern, it was way ahead of its time.
By the 1930s, parody was no longer the order of the day.
The world was a more serious place.
CHEERING DROWNS OUT SPEECH
And Walton settled on a traditional style,
in tune with the more sombre times.
He was now seen as the inheritor of the tradition of great composers
like Edward Elgar -
a composer to stir the country's heart during the coronation.
The moment that we wait for in these marches
is the appearance of the big melody.
In Elgar's case, of course,
it's the very famous... Land of Hope and Glory.
MUSIC: Land of Hope and Glory by Edward Elgar
What Walton does is very similar to this.
It has the same hymn-like, noble, understated quality.
MUSIC: Crown Imperial by William Walton
It could almost be by Elgar.
The music for this coronation was vital.
The first to be broadcast live on radio,
it was heard all over the British Empire.
A rousing soundtrack filling the airwaves
helped convey the message all was well.
MUSIC: Crown Imperial by William Walton
The coronation of a king or queen is an important moment
in the history of our nation
and the music that accompanies it has to be a kind of distillation
of the national character.
That's what Sir William Walton achieved magnificently
with Crown Imperial.
MUSIC: Crown Imperial by William Walton
Music to keep calm and carry on to.
But what the new king and the crowds gathered outside didn't realise,
this would be the last national celebration for a long while.
And classical music would soon take on an even more critical role.
BIG BEN CHIMES
RADIO: This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin
handed the German government a final note
stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock
that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland,
a state of war would exist between us.
SIREN
With war declared in September 1939,
Britain was an immediate target for German bombs.
In cities all over the country, air raid shelters were built,
gas masks issued, children evacuated
and families broken up.
Emergency orders also required that all theatres, cinemas and galleries
were to be closed.
This 1927 rosewood Steinway grand
belonged to one of Britain's most distinguished pianists.
It's called Myra.
MUSIC: Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring by Johann Sebastian Bach
It's named after Myra Hess.
And that is the music that made her famous.
It's called Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring.
Written originally by Bach in the 18th century,
but Myra did that arrangement especially for the piano
when she was young.
Now, that arrangement of hers really came into its own
during the Second World War.
It was calm and peaceful, beautiful and dignified.
And it became balm for the soul of the British nation
and Myra Hess' signature tune.
MUSIC: Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring by Johann Sebastian Bach
Britain's best known and most loved pianist when war broke out,
Myra told her friends how dismayed she was
that nothing cultural was happening to keep up morale.
One suggested holding a lunchtime concert, but where?
"Buckingham Palace? St Paul's?" they joked.
Then someone suggested the National Gallery.
It was empty but was it available?
So Myra came here to meet the Gallery's young director,
Kenneth Clark.
Myra Hess met Kenneth Clark and suggested giving
the occasional lunchtime concert.
"You must not give one single concert in the gallery,"
he said to her.
"You must give one every day."
After she recovered from the shock, Myra agreed it could be done.
The first concert took place on the 10th of October 1939.
Fearful that nobody would turn up,
Myra supposed she could at least rely on her friends to come along.
She needn't have worried. It was a sell-out.
MUSIC: Piano Concerto No 17 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Kenneth Clark later wrote about this event.
"What sort of people were these who felt more hungry for music
"than for their lunches?
"All sorts - young and old, smart and shabby,
"Tommies in uniform, old ladies with ear trumpets,
"civil servants, office boys.
"All sorts had come because they were longing for something
"to take them out of the muddle and uncertainty of the present
"and into a realm of dignity, order
"and unassailable independence."
For many, this was their first experience of classical concerts.
Some brought their own lunch
and the gallery sold exotic sandwiches,
a particular favourite being honey and raisin.
They heard Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn and of course Bach.
It was a daily lunchtime event.
It was very convenient.
The 88 bus from Clapham to Trafalgar Square.
There were big crowds and the music was wonderful and it was a...
It was a kind of affirmation that there was...
..music and beauty
and quiet...
in a noisy, rather turbulent world at that time.
I loved those concerts.
What was Myra Hess herself like?
What sort of impression did she make?
A feeling of total...
..mastery.
Which chimes absolutely with her, sort of, signature tune
of Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring. Did you hear her play that?
Yes. Oh, yes.
I think it encapsulated all that people would...
How they would like to feel.
We were all moved and transported by it.
It was the contrast, really,
between the lives we were all leading and the music.
It seems to me, in a way, from this perspective of now,
to look back and think of what Myra Hess and Kenneth Clark were doing...
Yes. ..was so ambitious, was so much... It was visionary.
It was visionary.
There was a very strong feeling that you would have been letting
the Germans win, if they stopped you,
just as people feel about terrorism today.
People still go out and people are still saying,
we mustn't let them win by affecting our lives too much.
That was a very strong feeling.
I think that these things had to be kept going.
For Myra Hess, music was an integral part of the life
of the entire nation.
Along with her London concerts, she also toured Britain.
"Everybody was very busy during the war," she said.
"There was nobody to tell the people classical music
"was over their heads, so they came and they liked it."
She'd often end her recitals
with Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring.
Once, a soldier was overheard whistling the tune.
"Are you interested in Bach?" someone asked him.
"No, said the soldier.
"But you're whistling one of his tunes."
"That's not Bach," said the soldier, "That's Myra Hess."
During the war, there were over 1,500 performances
enjoyed by more than 800,000 people.
With air raid sirens and bombs falling,
it's remarkable that the concerts ran uninterrupted.
This clamour for classical music,
its soothing and morale-boosting effect
was being felt elsewhere too,
but not all venues enjoyed the National Gallery's good fortune.
RADIO: The raiding Huns cared nothing for the hallowed atmosphere
of a temple of music.
To them, it was just another building
marked down for ruthless destruction.
The Queen's Hall was visited by the world's most famous orchestras,
musicians and artists.
It was the mecca of all that was noblest in music.
On the afternoon of May the 10th, 1941,
a sell-out audience heard Elgar's Dream of Gerontius
in London's Queen's Hall,
one of the greatest concert venues in the world.
Home of the Proms for nearly 50 years,
this hall brought wonderful music to millions.
It was the centre of our classical universe.
EXPLOSIONS
Hours later, London experienced its worst night of the Blitz.
Over 500 German planes dropped 700 tons of bombs
in a raid lasting seven hours.
Thousands were killed, major landmarks damaged,
including the Queen's Hall, which burned to the ground.
When Sir Henry Wood, the conductor who had made Queen's Hall famous
the world over, saw the ruins, he wept.
Standing amongst the debris, he spotted his bronze bust.
"So I'm still here," he exclaimed.
He was determined the end of the Hall
must not mean the end of the Proms.
They just needed a new venue.
Hi. Albert Hall, please.
Thanks.
Every year, before the start of the Proms season,
there's a very special delivery from the Royal Academy of Music
to the Royal Albert Hall.
And here it is. Here he is.
Because it's the bronze bust of Sir Henry Wood
which was salvaged from the ruins of the Queen's Hall back in 1941.
It's placed in the back of a black cab
and driven around to the Albert Hall,
where it stays for the entire duration of the Proms.
The Royal Albert Hall was the only space available.
Not known for its acoustic properties, a notorious echo
led one critic to say it was the only venue where a conductor
could hear his performance twice in the same evening.
Very gently. So line him up so he's facing forwards.
And then just sit him back on the back panel here.
Undeterred, Sir Henry stepped on to this podium
on the 12th of July, 1941,
to conduct the 47th season of the Proms.
Well, this is the programme from that Albert Hall Prom,
and the first item which is really interesting, I think,
is Elgar's Cockaigne Overture (In London Town).
In the notes, it says this is a reference
to London's imperturbable cheerfulness.
It was the best way possible for British music to respond
to the destruction of the Queen's Hall just a few months before.
MUSIC: Cockaigne Overture by Edward Elgar
First performed in 1901,
Elgar's Overture Cockaigne (In London Town)
was his love letter to the capital.
A huge success, it became one of his most popular works.
What sort of view of London does Elgar give us?
He gives us a very busy view.
What's fascinating about the piece is that in the first two minutes
we have idea after idea,
and he's so anxious to get on to the next London scene
that we barely have time to finish one.
At the very beginning, we have this, which Elgar said it should be played
with an air of humorous distinction.
So you get your beginning... PLAYS OPENING PART
..and the next minute, you're... PLAYS FASTER SECTION
..in a completely different key.
And what pictures is he creating there?
Here, I think, this seems to me like a Londoner.
This is a person, don't you think?
PLAYS OPENING PART
With a sort of... A bit of a saunter.
A bit of a grimace, a bit of a saunter,
a bit of something in... that sort of thing.
So it's a sort of Cockney character.
PLAYS A LOWER/SLOWER SECTION
And I seem there to see a London omnibus
being pulled along by great big shire horses.
With his lovers, there's a beautiful tune...
PLAYS A MORE UPBEAT SECTION
But that's it. It's just a little flavour of the lovers.
And we know they are lovers...?
Many people have said that they were lovers
and Elgar never contradicted them.
It must have been a really tremendous thing to listen to
a few weeks after the Queen's Hall had been bombed.
Absolutely. And it must have made everybody feel
very, very proud and very British.
I'm sure it did.
40 years after it was composed, Sir Henry Wood was using
Elgar's Cockaigne Overture to symbolise the spirit
that triumphs over the savagery of war.
Or, to put it more bluntly, this was two fingers up to the Germans.
MUSIC: Cockaigne Overture by Edward Elgar
Rising from the debris of the Queen's Hall,
the Proms move was a huge success.
Audiences doubled to fill this new, larger space.
This was no longer about raising morale,
we were saying, "Our spirit cannot be overcome".
It was almost Churchillian.
"We shall go on, not flag or fail."
Something London wasn't alone in declaring.
Early in July 1942, a top-secret document,
considered crucial to the war effort,
was copied onto 35mm film
and flown on a transport aircraft to Tehran.
It was put on a British armoured car,
which then began a long overland journey
right across Iraq and Jordan,
down to the Egyptian Canal Zone
and then on to Cairo.
From Cairo, it was flown over the Mediterranean to Gibraltar
before landing in Cornwall
and whisked to its final destination, London.
BIG BEN CHIMES
So what was on this mysterious microfilm?
Was it secret intelligence?
Information from the front line?
Or signals reporting?
No, it was this.
Page after page after page of quavers, semiquavers,
clefs and so forth.
It all goes to make up one of the world's most famous symphonies.
It happens to be one of my favourites too.
Dmitri Shostakovich's 7th Symphony.
The Leningrad.
EXPLOSIONS
Dmitri Shostakovich's 7th Symphony was written by candlelight
during the siege on his beloved home of Leningrad.
MUSIC: Symphony No. 7 by Dmitri Shostakovich
The Germans had the city surrounded, cut off from the outside world
in an attempt to starve its citizens to death.
Their plight was followed closely in Britain, where the 7th Symphony
became a symbol of hope - of good triumphing over evil.
Shostakovich said his weapon was his music.
The 7th Symphony was seen as a heroic work of resistance.
After the score was smuggled out of Russia,
there was a race among the world's leading conductors
to be the first to perform it, in a sign of solidarity
and friendship with the Russian people.
Henry Wood and the Proms won.
The Albert Hall was sold out, just as it is this evening.
There was a real air of anticipation,
of excitement, that night.
Everybody wanted to know what the young Shostakovich had written
in defence of his country.
RADIO: It is fitting that this work should receive its first performance
in this country on the anniversary of Germany's treacherous attack
on Russia.
It was written between July and December last year
in the besieged fortress of Leningrad
with the enemy close at its gates.
The symphony is to be played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra,
leader Jean Pougnet.
Sir Henry Wood is conducting.
Symphony No. 7, The Leningrad, in C,
by Dmitri Shostakovich.
MUSIC: Symphony No. 7 by Dmitri Shostakovich
The Leningrad's debut at the Proms
was heard by tens of thousands on the radio
and a packed-out audience inside the Royal Albert Hall.
Their applause lasted long into the night.
It's still a regular favourite here.
MUSIC: Symphony No. 7 by Dmitri Shostakovich
It's a huge symphony.
Well over an hour long and requiring more than 100 musicians to play it.
And right from the off, this music is heavy with symbolism,
not least the invasion theme of the first movement
featuring one of the most famous drum parts
in the whole of classical music.
That is a relentless kind of wall of sound coming at you.
It's, erm... It's terrifying.
This two-bar phrase repeated over and over again
that goes from the quietest level of dynamic
right the way up to the most you could ever play, I think.
It's an extraordinary story, of course,
the Seventh Symphony, isn't it?
And the way that the music was smuggled out.
Does the story of it matter to you when you're playing?
It's great to know what was the composer's intention
and the background around that piece.
I like to have that picture in my mind
of what he was obviously really going through and feeling
because it's a very emotional piece.
It's one of THE iconic parts for a percussionist. Absolutely.
To get that role in a symphony is almost, you know,
the most important thing you're going to do in symphonic repertoire
because it's so quiet for so long.
It really does test you as a player.
You can't move your hands when you're playing really quietly.
You've just...
The slightest movement will change the tone of the drum.
So I'm literally just moving the sticks a slight bit.
If I move them further the dynamic immediately comes up
and the sound changes.
That's actually really hard to do on the snare drum.
I've been in a battle.
I haven't been in a battle as big, of course, as Leningrad.
But I have been in battles with artillery
and planes coming over and dropping bombs
and there is nothing that I know outside this symphony
which brings that same sensation.
This is the real thing.
Well, I think that's the fantastic way Shostakovich manages to create
this sound from nothing,
the siege music starting very quietly, almost imperceptible,
and then gradually increasing to the point
where all the bombs are going off, everything is in chaos
and it's such a wall of sound.
MUSIC: Symphony No. 7 by Dmitri Shostakovich
For many, this piece of classical music was proof
of the humanity of the Russians, our friends and allies,
and the inhumanity of the Germans.
Shostakovich was now regarded as a wartime hero.
But not all musicians enjoyed such exalted status.
England's most promising young composer lived here in Aldeburgh.
Benjamin Britten was a conscientious objector
who had gone to America in 1939, convinced that Europe was finished.
Alienated by the flag-waving fervour of wartime,
his failure to return home at the outbreak of hostilities
angered patriots and his name was mud in some quarters.
But a longing for what he called "this grim and exciting coastline"
and a desperation to be part of British culture
led to his return in 1942.
He set about writing the opera that would save his reputation -
Peter Grimes.
And woven into the score
are four exceptional orchestral Sea Interludes.
MUSIC: Four Sea Interludes by Benjamin Britten
I have never listened to the Sea Interludes
actually sitting on a beach.
And you just realise how clever Benjamin Britten is.
If you take the first of them, Dawn,
you get this very multi-layered picture of the sea.
So there's this very high unison line of flutes and violins
that to me sound like sea birds, probably quite nasty seagulls,
kind of screaming around up there in the sky.
Then you get this next idea
which is obviously about the surface of the sea.
It's quite choppy.
This babbling, burbling line with the clarinets, violas and harps.
And then deep down, this ominous sound of bassoons
and low brass and low strings.
And to do that, to have those three viewpoints of the sea,
from up high, from the surface and from the dark deep,
it's just so clever.
MUSIC: Four Sea Interludes by Benjamin Britten
This is the coastline of my childhood,
which Britten captures perfectly.
Like the Sea Interludes, the story has several perspectives.
Peter Grimes is a fisherman who falls under suspicion and gossip
after a tragedy when his apprentice goes missing.
Grimes is an outsider
at odds with the society in which he finds himself.
Something that Benjamin Britten, as a pacifist and a gay man,
understood all too well.
# Steady
# There you are
# Nearly home
# What is home
# Calm as deep water
# Where's my home
# Deep in calm water
# Water will drink my sorrows dry
# And the tide will turn. #
It's only obviously, it's the excerpt,
but you have to carry all of the weight
of what he's gone through in the opera in the two and a half hours
to really be at that point successfully, I think.
So it does get quite emotionally draining.
But this is where he's really falling apart. Absolutely, yes.
# Peter Grimes
# Here you are
# Here I am
# Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry
# Now is gossip put on trial
# Bring the branding iron and knife for what's done now is done for life
# Come on
# Land me. #
Just listening to you singing that,
it strikes me just the way Britten uses notes to create a sense
of a man being shattered from the inside out.
It's amazing.
It is truly remarkable, this whole scene.
There are so many notes, so much of what Britten does
where it centres around two or three at different ends of the octave, but two or three notes.
They're worrying away at each other, aren't they?
They do. They constantly bump against each other.
His ability to write theatrically for human emotion
is pretty much unparalleled, I think.
It feels to me like a strange piece in a way
to be a big success after a war because it has so much darkness.
You'd think people would want a big flag-waving jamboree of a piece,
but that's not what they got.
But it was a huge hit.
I think one of the reasons is the message is so universal.
If you've been on a school playground,
at some point you've been the one
that all the other kids are pointing at and throwing stuff at
and you've been part of a group that's done it to someone else.
But why is it that we find Grimes so much a part of us?
Why do we sympathise with him?
Because he's not an attractive character.
He's quite confused about, things about,
I don't understand why they don't like me.
I've never done anything to any of them.
I stay out of the way, I go and do my thing, I'm good at what I do.
So what could I possibly have done
to earn the ire of this entire community?
Because he's not part of the community.
Britten said Grimes had more of him, the sea, Suffolk
and the worry of 20th-century life than anything he'd ever done.
He finished writing it as the war ended
and its premiere was the cause of feverish excitement.
London's famous Sadlers Wells Theatre
is opening for the first time since the Blitz
with a new work by the young British composer Benjamin Britten.
His first opera.
The opera in question makes news and musical history.
The occasion an important one for British music.
Once the curtain went up, I was completely transfixed.
The very first scene, the inquest scene,
when poor Grimes is interrupted all the time by this menacing person,
that was almost Gestapo sort of interrogation from the war.
# Peter Grimes
# We are here to investigate the cause of death
# Of your apprentice William Spode
# Whose body you brought ashore from your boat The Boy Billy. #
And also that sense that British opera had been non-existent really
since the late 17th century, since Henry Purcell. Exactly.
And that it was so unfashionable,
so difficult to set the language, all sorts of problems,
and yet Britten just came and announced himself.
The operas one had seen before that were Sadlers Wells.
They had been touring with these rather tired old operas
and suddenly here was new music which was rather shattering.
And it absolutely hit London. Everybody was talking about it.
The 38 bus conductor used to call,
"Alight here, Sadlers Wells,
"for Peter Grimes the sadistic fisherman."
So it obviously got through to all the, sort of, people.
There was this idea that we were going to be a new country
and everything was going to be all right and this was a symbol of that.
Peter Grimes was a huge hit.
Full of relatable characters that audiences could identify with,
it attracted people put off by more traditional opera.
Now the war was over, the government was looking to the future
and the role that music could play in creating a post-war society.
After the community spirit it had helped incubate during the war,
there was a real desire to make music available to all.
So if Benjamin Britten could bring people
who'd previously not liked classical music
to the opera house and the concert hall,
who else might he entice?
When I was a kid of about 11, this was my favourite recording.
A Young Person's Guide To The Orchestra, by Benjamin Britten.
I absolutely loved it and it became really the basis
of a lifelong interest in classical music.
It was a revelation to me.
Who knew that you could have such fun
in blowing, banging and scraping instruments?
The sounds in an orchestra are produced in three different ways.
By the musicians either blowing,
scraping or banging.
Benjamin Britten's Young Person's Guide was born in 1945.
Now, the blowing instruments, some are made of wood
and are called the woodwind.
It was for a film introducing children to the instruments
of an orchestra by breaking it down into parts
to showcase each individual sound.
Now for the scraping instruments.
These are played with a bow or plucked with the fingers
and are called the strings.
It was part of a post-war consensus education drive.
Finally, the banging instruments.
The percussion.
And here, in the British Library,
is something deemed to be so significant for the study
of British music, the Government wanted it kept in the country.
Da-da-dum-da-da-da-da-da-da-dum, dum-da-da-du-dum-dum-di.
This is Benjamin Britten's first draft
for The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.
He's already thinking about the orchestration.
At the beginning he writes "tutti",
which means everybody's playing - the whole orchestra.
Then, later on, strings only.
And then wind only.
And then...
flute, clarinet, bassoon.
Why was he so good at composing for children?
He did say once that he thought of himself as always being 13
and so he was always able to identify with children
when he was writing for them.
He knew exactly what children would want.
Do you think that Britten would be proud of the fact
that this is still very influential? Would he have liked that?
Oh, no question that he would have liked it very much.
He meant it as a young person's guide
and he'd be thrilled that young people are still learning
about the orchestra from this piece.
It's still Benjamin Britten's most popular
and frequently performed piece.
The Young Person's Guide is still taught in schools and today,
here at the wonderful Birmingham Symphony Hall,
they are playing host to a very special performance.
They're putting on a schools concert today.
The kids I'm here with, they've never heard an orchestra live,
they've never been to this hall before and they are super excited.
They get to see glockenspiels and double basses and contrabassoons
up close and personal.
Excited to hear all kinds of different instruments
and professional people play. Yeah.
My brother does play a bass guitar.
Do you fancy learning anything?
Wait until the end of the concert. You might find something that
you really like the sound of that you fancy picking up.
I really like drums. You love drums?
How long have you been playing the drums?
Erm, two to three years.
APPLAUSE
MUSIC: A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra by Benjamin Britten
There is no tale or story
other than the presentation of the orchestra.
Every single moment is full of content
and full of expression.
And is there a hope that you will just make that lasting impression,
something that really sticks with them for life? I am sure.
This is an experience they all will carry with them.
The more of those experiences we can share with them
while they are so young,
the greater it will be for all of us.
APPLAUSE
This piece came in the wake of the 1944 Butler Education Act,
which ensured all children had free secondary education
and put music on to the curriculum for the very first time.
Despite fighting a war,
the Government was still thinking about
how to introduce the next generation to classical music.
There must have been thousands upon thousands of young people
who, like me, were brought to classical music
by Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.
But there was something else about those years too.
Just think about it. The Government was saying to the nation,
"We're going to give you welfare, we going to give you education,
"we're going to give you health."
And there was something else too.
"We're going to give you classical music."
Now that really was extraordinary.
This was a huge change for the role of the state in post-war Britain.
The culture of the country was now seen as a government responsibility.
During the war, classical music had gone from accompanying grand events
to being a vital lifeline to normality.
It would now play a central role in the nation's reconstruction.
It would make Britain a better place.
REPORTER: Rising rapidly from the war debris of the South Bank,
London's great new concert hall by Hungerford Bridge
is taking recognisable shape.
I hope that this concert hall will give the opportunity
for the finest music,
the greatest singers and players to be heard,
and to give pleasure and refreshment of the soul
to generations of Londoners yet unborn.
APPLAUSE
That a new concert venue to be called the Royal Festival Hall
was the first major building work since the end of the war
showed our commitment to classical music.
It would be the centrepiece of the Festival of Britain
when it opened in 1951.
Just imagine the excitement, the anticipation.
You've had to endure years of horror and violence from the war,
then austerity, and finally you get to enjoy a day out
as a normal family.
And this is what awaits you.
This stunningly beautiful
people's palace.
People came here to see the future.
The festival was showcasing a radical vision
of what Britain might be.
It was all about innovation, design, science, technology.
And central to that new beginning was classical music.
Boy, was there a lot of it here.
The Festival of Britain began with a series of inaugural concerts
here at the Royal Festival Hall, which opened almost ten years
to the day of the destruction of the Queen's Hall.
COMMENTARY: London hasn't had a really good concert hall
since the Queen's Hall was destroyed by bombs in 1941.
But now, once again, London possesses a fine concert hall.
We're waiting for the conductor, Sir Malcolm Sargent.
RIPPLE OF APPLAUSE
Symphony No. 1 in C by Beethoven.
Just to give you an idea of how much music we are talking about,
in London alone over the summer of 1951,
there were 300 concerts.
And if you think about it, a Proms season of concerts - 80, 90 gigs.
This is three time as much music, so it's incredibly ambitious.
And it was a very German critic who very famously called Britain,
"Das land ohne musik" - the land without music.
Well, after the Festival of Britain opening in 1951,
one critic quipped that Britain was now -
"Das land mit almost too much music."
Britain was sending a message that unlike the enemy
we'd just defeated, we were a deeply cultured nation.
It was a message that was about to be broadcast
even louder to the world.
For the first time in history, through the medium of television,
the ancient and noble rite of a coronation service
will be witnessed by millions of Her Majesty's subjects.
After it was announced that the 1953 coronation would be shown
live on television, sales soared.
Over 2.5 million homes now had a television set.
On the day itself, over 20 million watched,
many crowding round friends' and neighbours' sets.
Soundtracking those images,
a collection of the best of British classical music.
There was Elgar, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Purcell
and Handel's Zadok the Priest.
MUSIC: Zadok the Priest by Handel
God save the Queen!
There was also a new piece - William Walton's Orb and Sceptre.
MUSIC: Orb and Sceptre by William Walton
Just as he'd done for her father in 1937,
William Walton created a new coronation march for Elizabeth.
Thrillingly tuneful and full of grandeur,
the march melded the great tradition of British regal music
with a fresh, forward-looking optimism.
This was music fit for a new Elizabethan age.
This was a very different Britain
from the one that Elizabeth's father had ruled.
And William Walton doesn't write a big imperial march here -
what he does is create something much more youthful-sounding
for our new, young queen, and for a Britain that felt very different,
driven by a new spirit of community, nationhood and family.
MUSIC: Nimrod by Edward Elgar
This coronation showcased our best classical music
to its biggest ever audience.
It was the greatest collection of music for a monarch
in over 150 years.
Between Elizabeth's coronation and that of her father back in 1937,
Britain had undergone a radical transformation.
From the dark days of war, we'd emerged bloodied
but still standing, optimistic of a bright future,
and all through that time, classical music was there for us.
It had been a time of terrible uncertainty.
Our monarchy, our democracy,
our very way of life had been threatened,
and classical music shone a light through those darkest of days,
comforting us, strengthening us, uniting us.
This was our soundtrack to resistance and resilience.
And when peace finally came,
classical music helped us to create a new future for the country.
You see, for people of my generation,
the immediate post-war generation that is, classical music
wasn't the elitist business that it had been before the war.
From now on, we saw it as our birthright.