When Timothée Chalamet noisily castigated opera and ballet as dying and irrelevant in February, you might have been forgiven for thinking he was speaking for his entire generation.
There was of course an immediate backlash from interested groups, but there is also hard evidence to refute the young man’s tired and facile claim. In the wake of his silly outburst, ticket sales for opera and ballet went up, not down. Last year’s BBC Proms averaged sales of around 90 per cent, with 41 concerts sold out, and the online audience increased by almost a third to 6.1 million streams. And now, a survey by a reputable research company suggests that naysayers like Chalamet are indeed on the wrong side of history.
In a report entitled Classical Pulse 2026: Classical Music Consumption Insights, with 8,000 respondents across 10 countries, a study for the Candlelight concert series has found that although Britons in general are now at the bottom of the European league in terms of classical attendances, millennials and members of the Gen Z tribe are replacing their elders in the concert hall. 40 per cent of that Proms audience, for its part, was aged under 40, and 20 per cent under 30.
A surprise? As there are more ways than one to flesh out these findings, let’s try another.
The Wigmore Hall in London has changed very little since it first opened in 1901 (Photo: Peter Dazeley/Getty)
London’s Wigmore Hall is universally regarded as the world’s leading temple of classical chamber music, with top-flight singers and instrumentalists all fighting for a slot. Last year, as the Arts Council’s cuts were decimating Britain’s concert halls and opera houses, Wigmore director John Gilhooly astonished the musical world by voluntarily withdrawing from the public support system. The hall was doing fine, he said, audiences were going steadily up, and they had no need of public subsidy at all.
When I quiz Gilhooly further, he attributes this success partly to the £5 tickets available to the under-35s, partly to the hall’s regular livestreams, and partly to the fact that the piano in particular has for some reason become young people’s way into classical music.
Why should this be? Is it something to do with Channel 4’s popular TV programme The Piano, on the first two series of which Lang Lang was a judge? Gilhooly’s as mystified as I am, but he’s not complaining. “It’s not just music students, though they are an important part of it,” he says. “Our new audiences come from all disciplines – engineers, architects, young doctors. They’re interested in early music and the Russian repertory, as well as Chopin. They want chamber music, and they love anything by Bach. Debussy’s piano music used to be box-office death, but that’s emphatically not so with today’s young people.”
Gilhooly and his Hall are currently basking in a blaze of publicity. On 25 May, they will celebrate the 125th anniversary of its opening in 1901, with a two-week festival starring the most thrilling vocal and instrumental stars on the planet.
Julia Boyd’s book details the fascinating history of Wigmore Hall
Meanwhile, perfectly on cue, a book will be published entitled There Is Sweet Music Here: the World of Wigmore Hall. Racily written by Julia Boyd, it tells the story of how the hall was conceived, how it weathered two world wars and how it has managed to maintain its stratospherically high artistic standards without a break.
It was built by the piano-manufacturing Bechstein family, but with German musicians playing German music, on a German piano, in a German-owned hall, the outbreak of war in 1914 meant its name had to change. Hence it was named “Wigmore”, after the street it was on, rather than “Bechstein”, and has stayed that way ever since.
Ferruccio Busoni and Eugene Ysaye – respectively the world’s top pianist and violinist – had been its opening stars, and the glittering cavalcade of performers and composers who followed them ensured that internationalism was the keynote, with compositions in the early years from Saint-Saens, Fauré, Bartok and Stravinsky.
The Wigmore was apparently a cool place to hang out in the 1930s – with Virginia Woolf and her literary friends among regular attenders – and it’s still a cool place to hang out today. Decades ago, as a young child, I was taken to a piano recital at the Wigmore Hall. And if every detail of that evening remains sharp in my memory, it’s because virtually nothing has changed since.
One of the most significant themes of Boyd’s book lies in the way the critics of the Times and Telegraph covered events at the hall: detailed and knowledgeable, passionately pro or anti, and sharply critical when criticism was called for. Those critics wrote – and were read – as members of the same family of musicians, and they didn’t talk down to their readers. A deep knowledge of classical music was taken as read.
The Wigmore Hall in its original iteration as Bechstein Hall, before the First World War (Photo: kmorrison@wigmore-hall.org.uk)
But what is classical music? Hard to define neatly, it’s characterised by a variety of criteria: its social purpose, its degree of refinement, and the extent to which it aspires to be venerated as art, viz our sending it out into space on board NASA’s Voyager in 1977.
This music lives on because of its central mystery: to many aficionados, classical music can feel more “real” than physical reality. I am one such: I sometimes have the feeling that a composer has discovered a work, rather than created it; that it was there already, and was just waiting to be found. Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas are for me a prime case in point.
That idea of permanence is key. Haydn with his 104 symphonies and Mozart with his works, and Beethoven with his – all reinforced the same theoretical underpinning for classical music that lasted right up until the start of the 20th century.
The First World War dislocated European classical music’s creative stream – as it dislocated the trajectory of all the other arts – but it has retained its underlying continuity. Such a rich history so fundamentally linked to human experience is bound to endure; it is no wonder that young people are seeking it out, perhaps as an antidote to an online world that feels, by contrast, less “real” by the day.
And the Wigmore’s anniversary festival fortnight starting next month – which Radio 3 will broadcast in full – is an ideal place to sample classical chamber music at its best. Many of the soloists are worth a journey in themselves, but when you get recitals by hot-shot pianists like Alexandre Kantorow, Yunchan Lim, and Igor Levit in the space of three days, the prospect is eye-popping; some of the vocal events should be to die for, too.
The Wigmore Hall has seen a surge in young attendees (Photo: Peter Dazeley/Getty Images)
Meanwhile, the BBC has just launched Key Changes, Radio 3’s year-long weekly history of classical music, as purveyed by an army of musicians and musicologists. At the end of this marathon, assiduous listeners should be able to set up shop as musicologists themselves.
And finally we have the Proms, whose recently unfurled programme points to a continuation of the BBC’s new amalgam of high art and popular culture.
The bottom line of all this is that classical music in Britain has never been in ruder health. But – all this is about European music! If Gen Z are going mad for Bach and Beethoven, who knows how they’d respond to the ghostly thrill of Japanese gagaku, or the heady muscularity of male polyphony in Georgia? What would they make of the exquisite sound-world of traditional music in war-torn Iran, or the glory of North India’s ravishing raga music?
There are many more classical musics out here, all waiting to be heard and enjoyed by new generations of younger listeners, if only promoters (including the Proms) would give them a proper airing.
‘There Is Sweet Music Here’ by Julia Boyd is out on 21 May. Michael Church is the editor of ‘The Other Classical Musics: Fifteen Great Traditions’, published by the Boydell Press