III
In the West Cincinnati takes the lead as a pioneer in choral music. As early as 1819 there was a Haydn Society in Cincinnati which seems to have been the successor of an older organization. Its first concert was devoted to Handel and Haydn, and its second included also Mozart. Soon afterward were born the Episcopal Singing Society and the Euterpean Society. Then came the Sacred Music Society and the Amateur Musical Association. The latter gave the 'Creation' in 1853. Coincidentally there grew up a number of Männerchor societies, which in 1849, collaborating with several similar bodies in neighboring towns, organized the first of the great Sängerfeste already mentioned. In 1856 the Cecilia Society came into being and inaugurated a new era for choral music in Cincinnati. At its first concert it performed Mendelssohn's 'Forty-second Psalm,' a cantata of Mozart, a chorus for female voices from Spontini's Vestale, Haydn's 'Come, Gentle Spring,' and some choruses from Schneider's 'Last Judgment.' Subsequently it presented other works of Haydn, Mozart, and Mendelssohn, as well as compositions of Beethoven, Schumann, Handel, Gluck, Gade, Neukomm, Weber, and Wagner.
The next important society in Cincinnati was the Cincinnati Harmonic, out of which grew the Festival Chorus Society. The latter was organized in connection with the Cincinnati May Festivals which started in 1873 and in which thirty-six societies from the West and Northwest, including over one thousand singers, participated. The stimulation furnished by this and subsequent coöperative festivals resulted, as Theodore Thomas hopefully predicted, in sending 'new life and vigor into the whole musical body of the West.' Cincinnati still retains its activity in choral music and possesses a large number of excellent singing societies, most of which are German. Among these we may mention the Männerchor and the Orpheus as perhaps the most conspicuous.
It would indeed be impossible to estimate fully the value the influence exercised by Germans and German singing societies had on the cultivation of music in America. In Milwaukee, for example, the Musikverein, organized in 1849, stood for years as a beacon light of musical culture, shedding its rays far and near over the artistic darkness of the newly settled West. 'The elements of which the Musik-Verein was composed,' says Ritter, 'were many-sided. There were to be found that German indigenous growth, the Männerchor (male chorus), the orchestra, the chorus composed of male and female voices, amateurs performing the different solo parts. The whole field of modern musical forms was cultivated by those enthusiastic German colonists, the male-chorus glee, the cantata, the oratorio, the opera, chamber music in its divers forms, the overture, the symphony were placed on the programs of this active society. Its musical life was a rich one and its influence through the West was of great bearing on a healthy musical development.'
There are over twenty German choruses in Milwaukee; in St. Louis there are probably as many, while in Chicago the number is beyond count—there are certainly more than one hundred. St. Louis started its musical life rather early and established a Philharmonic Society in 1838. Seven years later a Polyhymnia Society was formed and about the same time a Cecilian Society and an Oratorio Society came into being. A new Philharmonic Society was organized in 1859 and later came the St. Louis Choral Society. These, of course, leave out of account the German societies, of which the most prominent are the Liederkranz, the Socialer Sängerchor, the Germania Sängerbund, the Orpheus, and the Schweizer Männerchor. As early as 1858 Chicago had a Musical Union devoted to the study of oratorio. During the eight years of its existence it gave the principal oratorio classics, including the 'Creation,' 'Messiah,' and 'Elijah.' It was succeeded by the Oratorio Society, which persevered, under the conductorship of Hans Balatka, until the great fire. After the fire it was revived, but in 1873 its library and effects were again burned and further attempts to continue it were unavailing. The summer of 1872 saw the organization of the Apollo Club, which is to-day the only society of importance in Chicago devoted to the cultivation of oratorio music. There is also a Chicago Musical Art Society patterned after the Musical Art Society of New York and doing similar work. These are the chief agencies for the cultivation of choral music in Chicago, apart from the multitude of German societies to which we have already alluded.
San Francisco had an oratorio society, organized by Rudolph Herold, as early as 1860, and soon afterward a Handel and Haydn Society entered the field. The fact that these societies received support during several years of competitive existence speaks well for the state of musical cultivation in San Francisco at that date. And certainly the city has not deteriorated musically since then, if we may judge from the number of choral societies now active there.
The most notable of these is the Loring Club, a male chorus, founded in 1876, which gives concerts of unusual artistic excellence. Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland—in fact all the coast cities—are wide-awake and progressive musical centres and possess efficient organizations devoted to church work. It would be impossible to note all of them. Indeed, the compass of a bulky volume would scarcely inclose reference to all the choral societies at present active in the United States. There is scarcely a community in the land which does not possess one or more such societies, ranging in character from church choirs to the most pretentious of choral organizations. Many of them, especially in such cities as Baltimore, Washington, New Orleans, Richmond, Louisville, Dallas, Denver, and Kansas City, compare favorably with the more widely known societies of New York, Boston, and Chicago. We must also advert again to the work of the German singing societies, which flourish in practically every city in the country, and to the less widespread activities of the Scandinavian singing societies in such centres as Lindsborg, Kansas. These supplement splendidly the work of the native American societies, which, to tell the truth, are more exclusively devoted to the classics of sacred music than is good for their æsthetic health. Altogether the cultivation of choral music is carried on most vigorously throughout the length and breadth of America. It must be admitted that, except in certain circumscribed localities—Massachusetts, for example—it has not yet struck root among the people. It is still carried on chiefly by social coteries, by churches, by artistic circles, by people with aspirations. Americans do not get together and sing from an inward urge to sing, as do the Germans and other people implanted in our midst. Possibly that will come with the racial homogeneity which this great crucible of a country is striving to bring forth. In the meantime, everything that an eager, ambitious, and optimistic people can do to overcome its musical handicaps is now being done by the people of America and the multiplicity and activity of its choral organizations are symptomatic of the energy of its endeavor.
In the meantime the only choral organization in the American continent that can compare with the premier European ensembles has been developed in Canada. The fact is not without its significance. The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, to which we refer, stands out among American choirs even more prominently than does the Boston Symphony Orchestra among American orchestras, and its marked preëminence has been acknowledged without a dissentient voice by the whole body of critical opinion in this country. It was founded in 1894 by Sir Edmund Walker, Dr. A. S. Vogt, Dr. Harold Clark and Messrs. W. E. Rundle, W. H. Elliott, A. E. Huestis, and T. Harold Mason, and since the beginning it has been under the conductorship of Dr. Vogt. The general policy of the Toronto Choir is the study and performance of works concerning practically the whole range of choral composition, including all forms of a cappella work, operatic excerpts, standard oratorios, cantatas and lesser forms. Among the more important works performed by the choir may be mentioned Brahms' 'German Requiem,' Verdi's 'Manzoni Requiem,' Bach's 'B Minor Mass,' Wolf-Ferrari's 'The New Life,' Elgar's 'King Olaf,' 'Caractacus' and 'The Music Makers,' Pierné's 'The Children's Crusade' and Coleridge-Taylor's 'Hiawatha' and 'A Tale of Old Japan.' Included also in the repertory of the choir are smaller works by Palestrina, Lotti, Elgar, Hugo Wolf, Granville Bantock, Percy Pitt, Max Reger, Tschaikowsky, Moussorgsky, Sibelius, Rachmaninoff, Gretchaninoff, Brahms, Richard Strauss, Nowowiejski, and others. Besides its annual cycle of five festival performances at home the Toronto Choir has made frequent visits to the more important musical centres of the United States. It has given three concerts in Chicago, two in Cleveland, seven in Buffalo, four in New York, and one in Boston.
As indicating the impression made by this organization on the centres of musical culture in the United States we may quote the following from Philip Hale's criticism of its first performance in Boston: 'It is not too much to say that its performance was a revelation to even those who heard the celebrated choruses of this country and in European cities. Other choruses may show a high degree of technical perfection; they may be conspicuous for decisive attack, perfect intonation, unvarying precision, fleetness in rapid passages, the management of breath or distribution of singers that insures musical and rhetorical phrasing. The Mendelssohn Choir is thus conspicuous, but it has other qualities that are rare in choirs even for a small and carefully selected number. This choir of Toronto is remarkable for exquisite tonal quality. In piano passages the tone is as though disembodied. There is no thought of massed singers or of any individual singer. The vigor of these singers never approached coarseness, and in fortissimos that were "as the voice of many waters" there was always the suggestion of reserve force, so that there was beauty in strength. There were delicate nuances in the performance, sudden and surprising contrasts without disturbance in rhythm and without loss in purity of intonation. These nuances and contrasts were apparently spontaneous.' H. T. Parker wrote on the same occasion: 'In our musical generation Boston has heard no such choral singing as that of the Mendelssohn Choir in Symphony Hall, last evening, and applauded no choral conductor of such ability as its leader, Dr. Vogt. Now, whether the singers be one or two hundred, a beautiful tone, an expressive tone, a varied tone, is the sum and the substance, the beginning and the end of musical impartment. No choir, no choral conductor, has so mastered these secrets or gone so far in high and various attainment in them as Dr. Vogt and these Torontans. It seems almost pedagogical, before these higher achievements of the Mendelssohn Choir, to rehearse the technical skill of the choristers and their conductor—their fidelity to the true pitch, their decisiveness of attack, their precision of utterance, their separate and collective command of vocal technique, their sense of pace and rhythm. Like unanimity and a unique sensitiveness equally distinguished the singing of the choir on its expressive, its poetizing, its dramatizing side.'