The Sopranos, post-War culture and a dated Worst Night of the Proms
In one of the most prescient episodes of The Sopranos, the news that a Native American pressure group is set on disrupting the Newark Columbus Day Parade “in protest of Columbus’s role in the genocide of America’s native peoples” shocks Tony Soprano’s crew of Italian-American gangsters. Loyal lieutenant Silvio responds: “It’s anti-Italian discrimination. Columbus Day is a day of Italian pride. It’s our holiday and they want to take it away.”
That Furio, who is a native Italian on secondment from the Neapolitan mob, doesn’t think Columbus is all he is cracked up to be (“I never liked Columbus… he was from Genoa… I hate the north”) doesn’t perturb the crew, some of whom turn up to have some argy-bargy with the protesters.
But Silvio just cannot get over the idea that his culture has been insulted. On reflecting that he had missed joining in the scuffle, he burbles to himself: “I should have been there… I forgot this was a Monday… they discriminate against all Italians as a group when they disallow Columbus.”
Tony Soprano, incensed, tells Silvio to shut up about it: “Oh will you fucking stop. Group, group… Columbus was so long ago he might as well have been a fucking movie… Where the fuck is our self-esteem? That shit doesn’t come from Columbus or The Godfather or Chef-fucking-Boyardee.”
This scene is only one part of a rich commentary on diaspora culture and identity developed throughout The Sopranos. The Sopranos are a “family” and a “culture” in crisis. The family unit with Tony and Carmela as husband and wife and two children, one son and one daughter, in high school is riven with the conventionally suburban problems: Tony is a philanderer; Anthony Junior is moody; Meadow, ambitious and arsey. But The Sopranos are also a network of men engaged in traditional criminal activities (waste disposal, strip clubs, and protection rackets) that become less and less profitable and prove more and more dysfunctional in a nascent economy of information, services and retail consumption. Why would a coffee shop run by a multinational chain need to pay protection?
The Columbus Day episode is a case in point – estranged from their native “culture” by geography and a century of emigration, and on the wrong side of a new identity politics which looks with revulsion on America’s European past, Silvio and his pals understandably feel a bit lost. What do we get to be proud of? Tony’s answer is as blunt as it is instructive: just get over it. Your self-esteem, if you have it, depends, ultimately, on the things you do, the projects you pursue, the people you choose to love and invest in, not this or that statue or whether a parade goes ahead or not, or some invented tradition.
Much of our contemporary debate on the status of cultural heritage – how we relate to “the past” and the practices we should adopt in light of our traditions – falls along the lines of the first “political correctness” culture wars of the late 1990s, a debate reflected in the way The Sopranos engages with Italian-American culture in an era of globalisation.
Potent themes of victimhood and threat contour much of the way we talk about national heritage, a debate made more essentially absurd in Britain given the high status we have traditionally ascribed to radical ideas of tolerance and individual liberty. An interesting shift away from those traditions took place in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War – a war of survival, which forged a remarkable consensus over what was said to constitute our national mission (followed by a rapid and pragmatic abandonment of our global role in the shape of the last dominions of Empire).
It left us with artefacts like the Last Night of the Proms, which really gained popularity after the Second World War in the form that we now know it. In this form, it represents an interesting reshaping of the late 18th century “John Bull” era of popular entertainment, when tunes like Rule Britannia – written by Thomas Arne as part a masque dedicated to the accession of George II – became commonplace. The subject of Arne’s masque was Alfred the Great, and it told the story of a newly confident British nation, victorious at sea and united across borders, with reference to the Anglo-Saxon king’s triumph over the Vikings.
In the post-War era of national mission, which was forged from an experience of genuine sacrifice and commitment, coupled with popular ironising about the legacy of Empire, the Last Night of the Proms was an innovative development matching the spirit of the times. Much has changed since the events of the mid-20th century. We no longer have National Service and, in the main, the British have not fought in wars (bar the Falklands War against an aggressive Fascist junta) that have left us with a legacy as unifying as the Second World War.
In recent years, the Last Night of the Proms has felt out of step with a culture that, over the past few decades, has merely returned to historical form – Britain has, for some centuries, been an extensively commercial society with a highly individualistic attitude to personal freedom. Indeed, the BBC itself, an institution that had its glory days in the same post-War period, increasingly struggles to work out how to speak for “the nation” and is routinely lambasted for failing to deliver on the promises of a “common culture”.
So why not recapture the “original” spirit of the Proms instead? It has its own particular history and traditions which are nothing to with John Bull or King Alfred or the British Empire. It was a product of the creative genius of two men, the conductor Henry Wood (1869-1944) and the impresario Robert Newman (1858-1926). Newman wanted to make lots of money (he had worked in the City as a stockjobber), so he drew the punters in with cheap tickets and lots of concerts. He was also a music obsessive: “I’m going to run nightly concerts and train the public by easy stages. Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music,” he told Wood.
Wood went on to conduct every one of the Prom performances that took place until 1941. Once Newman had “created a public”, Wood put on quite the show. He programmed oodles of new music – and put on premieres of Mahler, Schoenberg, and many of the other European giants of his time, and he also made the Proms a special place for new compositions. He called them his “novelties”. By the end of his career, Sir Henry had introduced more than 700 pieces to British audiences. It is no surprise then that the concerts were known – until quite recently – as the “Henry Wood Promenade concerts”.
It is fruitless to speculate, but I wonder what Wood the innovator would have thought about a programme for the Last Night that had undergone virtually no change over the course of half a century. The real message of the Proms is that important questions like “What constitutes my culture?” and “Who gets to sing along?” can only be dwelt on for so long – there are other things for us to discover, new music to hear, new peaks to climb.