``Rule, Britannia! Britannia rules the waves! Britons never, never, never will be slaves.”
While the empire is long gone, it remains embedded in the song’s lyrics, which suggest Britain was created at ``Heaven’s command” and end with the rousing chorus:
“Rule, Britannia!” was first performed in 1740 when Britain, backed by the might of the Royal Navy, was building an empire that stretched from India to South Africa and Jamaica. The final night has traditionally featured a triumphant emotional singalong of patriotic songs like “Rule, Britannia!” It’s a flag-waving fixture on the calendar and is seen as an expression of national pride in Britain. The Proms is an annual series of summer concerts that was created in 1895 and has been organized by the BBC since 1927. Late Tuesday, it issued a second statement saying that the lyrics would return to the program in 2021. ``The Proms will reinvent the Last Night in this extraordinary year so that it respects the traditions and spirit of the event whilst adapting to very different circumstances at this moment in time,″ the BBC said. The BBC on Monday rejected the ``unjustified personal attacks” on Stasevska and said the changes in the program were made by the corporation after consulting all the artists involved. The controversy arose Sunday when the Sunday Times newspaper reported that the BBC was considering scrapping the songs amid concerns about their ``perceived association with colonialism and slavery.” Dalia Stasevska, the 35-year-old Finn who will conduct the concert, was seeking to modernize the event and reduce the ``patriotic elements,’’ the newspaper said, without citing a source for the information. ``The BBC will allow the tune to be played but not sung, thereby offending all shades of opinion all the time,” music critic and author Norman Lebrecht wrote in a blog post after the BBC announced the program for the Sept.
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