The world’s greatest festival of music continues to grow under the splendid stewardship of Roger Wright, but there is always plenty of missionary work to do, for the world will never run short of grouches.
The world’s greatest festival of music continues to grow under the splendid stewardship of Roger Wright, but there is always plenty of missionary work to do, for the world will never run short of grouches. Perhaps, like Sir Harold Acton in his Tuscan grotto, who loved to ‘hunt philistines’, we should trap the blighters in cages and force them to listen to lashings of Beethoven and Wagner until they recant. Step forward, if you will, Miss Lynsey Hanley. Miss Hanley recently contributed a well-meaning but ultimately silly piece to the Guardian about the place of high culture in our national life. ‘When we talk about a cultured person,’ she said, with rather more certainty than was wise, ‘it’s clear we’re also making an inference based on class.’ Are we indeed? Others, less obsessed by social class, may argue that we’re talking about other things: taste, judgment, curiosity. It is largely true, I grant you, that most people who attend the Proms belong to the middle class. So do most people who go to theatres and opera houses, dine in good restaurants, patronise decent bookshops, visit interesting places on their holidays, and listen to Radios 3 and 4. There can be nothing more middle class than the celebrated literary festival at Hay on Wye, which is supported so enthusiastically (and hats off to them) by the Guardian.
Alan Sillitoe, who passed away earlier this year, was genuinely working class, not that he made a meal of it. He educated himself, he once said, by making good use of libraries and museums, which were available to all free of charge, and listening to great music on a wireless that cost a few bob.
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