Nineteenth-Century Choral Music

Donna M. Di Grazia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415988520
• eBook ISBN: 9781136294099
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Nineteenth-Century Choral Music is an in-depth examination of the rich repertoire of choral music and the cultural phenomenon of choral music making throughout the period. The book is divided into three main sections. The first details the attraction to choral singing and the ways it was linked to different parts of society, and to the role of choral voices in the two principal large-scale genres of the period: the symphony and opera. A second section highlights ten choral-orchestral masterworks that are a central part of the repertoire. The final section presents overview and focus chapters covering composers, repertoire (both small and larger works), and performance life in an historical context from over a dozen regions of the world: Britain and Ireland, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latin America, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Scandinavia and Finland, Spain, and the United States.

This diverse collection of essays brings together the work of 25 authors, many of whom have devoted much of their scholarly lives to the composers and music discussed, giving the reader a lively and unique perspective on this significant part of nineteenth-century musical life.

Part I

Cultural Influences

1

The Building of Community through Choral Singing

Celia Applegate

UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER

Music-making in human society has always been a group activity. No other kind of music-making demonstrates this as simply and as fully as does choral singing, and no other century in recorded human history was so rich in forms of choral activity, so diverse in venues and sizes and purposes of choral activity, as was the nineteenth. Even though many of these forms have survived, in one way or another, into the twenty-first century and estimates of numbers of regular choral singers in the United States alone reach into the millions, the nineteenth century remains the choral century par excellence. We may be, as historian Suzanne Marchand put it, “embarrassed by the nineteenth century,” suspicious of its officious energy, put off by its Eurocentric complacency, baffled by its sentimentality, its respectability, above all its earnestness, but we nevertheless continue to live off its work.¹ Its institutions and organizations, its rediscoveries and revivals, its compositions and publications created an enduring place for choral song in modern Western society.

Of course, one might attribute that endurance to the quality of the choral repertoire as a whole, which includes works that most would consider among the greatest in all of Western art music. And given that many of these greatest of works—the St. Matthew Passion, Messiah, The Creation— belong in some literal sense to the eighteenth century, what do we really owe to those singing masses of the nineteenth? Handel’s and Haydn’s choral works sailed straight on into our own times as though the winds of change themselves were behind them. Bach and Palestrina, to be sure, took a little extra effort on the part of their nineteenth-century admirers to be sung and heard again, and we would certainly want to credit the century with producing a significant, though not disproportionately large, number of works one still wants to sing or hear. But against all that, we should probably also weigh in the balance what Percy Young memorably dubbed “mediocrity in spate.” “In the whole history of music,” he observed in Churchillian cadences, rarely has “so much deplorable music by so many experienced composers” been written as in the second half of the nineteenth century.² Their compositional failures, moreover, he blamed on the public itself, whose insatiable demand for new choral works, combined with the pious tyranny of “good taste,” bequeathed to posterity “great heaps of discarded choral compositions which represent almost the total output in this medium of practically every composer whether major or minor.”³

Yet even if the first half of the nineteenth century were called in to redeem its second half, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, perhaps, making up for Max Bruch’s thirty-one choral works that have ended up on the discard pile, we would still be in no position to take the measure of this century by such means. The choral activity that formed so large a part of nineteenth century music-making should strike us fundamentally as a cultural phenomenon, that is, an expression of values and needs that were not merely or only musical. To approach the subject this way does not require dismissing the particularities of the music itself as mere surface noise that obscures a deep evolutionary history of singing as well as a shallower social and political history of change and modernization. It requires only that one find revelation in the rehearsal schedule of Leipzig’s pioneering Choral Society for Sacred Music as well as in the key modulations of the German Requiem, in the musical understanding of Thomas Alsager as well as in that of Beethoven, whose Missa solemnis was performed in full in Alsager’s Bloomsbury drawing room on Christmas Eve 1832.⁴ The choral century mobilized tremendous numbers of people in formal and informal musical activities, in public, semi-public, and private music-making, in single-sex and same-sex singing, in sacred, communal, and national musical gatherings, and in all the varied combinations of these elements that one could devise.

For a decade or more, musicologists and historians have been going back and forth on the question of whether something happened to music in the course of the eighteenth century, something that perhaps had less to do with the transition from Bach to Mozart than with changes in attitudes regarding such people and their compositions. For some scholars, the “dominant conception” of music changed. People began to think about music “in terms of the production, performance, and preservation of works” and, as a result, to listen to music for its own sake.⁵ Or as Ray Robinson and Allen Winold put it in their introduction to choral singing, “the very thought of a concert, at which large numbers of people would gather for the purpose of listening to a performance, would have seemed strange to the medieval mind.”⁶ For others, William Weber and Charles Rosen among them, one cannot assume that the absence of our musical behaviors—for example, silence at a performance—means, ipso facto, the absence of seriousness and attention to music as such.⁷

These debates have particular relevance for our explanations of the practices, places, and purposes of choral music that emerged in this same period of transition. Whether or not people began for the first time really to listen to music for its own sake in the eighteenth century, they most certainly began to hear it, see it, and perform it on an increasingly large and socially diverse scale. That new experiences would come out of new attitudes or that new attitudes would be prompted by new experiences seems commonsensical, yet connecting the two—attitude and activity—is by no means as straightforward as one might wish it to be. Why, for instance, did Prussian court composer Carl Friedrich Fasch take such interest in the early Italian Baroque composer Orazio Benevoli? And why did he shortly thereafter, in 1791, decide to found a choral group in Berlin, the Singakademie, that consisted largely of women and amateurs? And why did this choral group grow to some hundreds of singers, expanding to include men as well as women, within a decade and prove to be a model for other such groups all over central Europe and beyond? The first questions may admit of straightforward and limited answers: to the first, his friend Johann Friedrich Reichardt brought him a work of Benevoli from a trip to Italy and Fasch really liked it; to the second, he wanted to hear it sung, so he gathered some available singers together for that purpose. But the third question opens up a vast field of aesthetic, social, and political considerations to our consideration. In the case of music especially, the practice of which has always been as much diverse and dispersed as it has been congruent and concentrated, questions of cause and effect, context and substance, have multi-faceted answers. The only way to approach them, then, is to divide up the choral landscape into parts and hope thereby to find the characteristics and interconnections that made the nineteenth century distinctive.

Before turning to that landscape, we might take a moment to consider deep history with its intriguing potential to illuminate questions of why people make music together at all.⁸ The capacity for what biologists call “behavioral synchrony,” that is, in historian William McNeill’s formulation, “keeping together in time,” seems to be one of the few traits of living creatures unique to human beings. Chimpanzees make and use tools, manipulate and deceive, mourn and fall in love, understand relational syntax and numerical sequences, and appreciate the beauty of a sunset over a lake. But, as paleontologist Steven Mithen has written, they “cannot keep to a beat, even with training” and even alone, let alone with groups of their fellow chimps.⁹ Certainly the contemplation of why several hundred people were willing and more or less able to sing the same thing “together in time,” as they did in countless nineteenth-century choral festivals, or ten people for that matter, does indeed make one wonder if there is not something more going on than love of the music. McNeill, for his part, thinks that communal rhythmic activity, whether dancing or drilling together, does not derive from social bonds. It creates them and constantly re-animates them, thus making possible the very experience of society itself, which is one of “boundary loss” between individuals.¹⁰

But while McNeill makes his case on the basis of a lifetime of sweeping historical investigations, biologists have been looking for the physiological manifestations of this bonding. The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has suggested that music-making in groups releases surges of endorphins in the brains of participants, thus making them happy to be together. The neurobiologist Walter Freeman looks to the hormone oxytocin. The release of it, for instance while singing together, loosens certain kinds of synaptic connections in the brain through which we store knowledge we have already acquired. Once freed of these prejudices, the brain is apparently more able to acquire “new understanding through behavioral actions that are shared with others,” in other words, to form groups.¹¹ Joan Oliver Goldsmith, in her quasi-memoir of the experience of choral singing, tells of how four women, strangers to each other, came practically to be able to read each other’s thoughts in the course of a week of carpooling and singing in intensive choral rehearsals at the Aspen Music Festival. Although one might attribute this effect to the carpooling, Goldsmith prefers the musical metaphor of “quartet making,” attributing the bonding, which has lasted ever since, to experiencing music together, whether listening, rehearsing, or performing.¹² The science would seem to back her up.

The Festive Century: Singing in Big Groups

Making music in groups, then, does not just express but enables our capacity for cooperative existence and action. Turning to the rise of large-scale choral singing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period that by any measure saw major changes in the circumstances of people’s lives and thus major challenges to traditional social bonds, we should, I think, remain conscious of such deeper undercurrents to this new form of social activity, even as we attend to the rich specificity of its effects. Henry Raynor’s classic social history of music since 1815 suggested that “it would not be merely fanciful” to see the large orchestras of the nineteenth century as “an essential expression of the personality” of that age. Linking new conceptions of musical force and complexity to new methods of warfare and industry, with their “precise co-ordination of many disparate specialist functions,” Raynor sees a reflective relationship between industrial civilization and the symphony orchestra.¹³ In looking at the ever more multitudinous mixed-voiced choruses that began to proliferate from the last decades of eighteenth century on, one is tempted to link the mobilization of the choral crowd to the mobilization of crowds of a less musical sort in the era of the French Revolution. People making lots of noise together seemed consonant with the mood of the times, and once an organizer had gathered together 200 for a performance, then 300, then 500, little seemed to resist the notion of a chorus of 10,000 and orchestra of 1,000, such as gathered in Boston for the National Peace Jubilee and Musical Festival of 1869.

But just as the actual size of revolutionary crowds matters less than their place, mood, and the response to them, so too does the phenomenon of large choruses require further investigation than the inventory of their growing presence on the musical landscape can provide. The story of singing in big groups begins in Great Britain. The first large-scale choral performances, immediate ancestors of the sort that became so widespread in the nineteenth century, themselves grew out of a congeries of Anglican musical rituals, some dedicated to St. Cecilia’s Day, some to charitable fund-raising (especially for clerical widows and orphans), and some to royal thanksgiving services. These all crystallized by the mid-eighteenth century in the Festival of the Sons of the Clergy in London and the provincial Three Choirs Festival, though that moniker, interestingly, was not used until much later, in the tradition-conscious nineteenth century. These gatherings in turn found an immediate heir in the Lenten performances of George Frideric Handel’s newly composed oratorios. Already in 1784, with the enormous centenary commemoration of Handel in Westminster Abbey, the model received an early apotheosis, with choirs and choral societies from all over England assembling to sing Messiah.

The British, first to industrialize, thus developed in a short amount of time a “social and musical ritual” that, in the words of William Weber, “proved remarkably appealing and adaptable.”¹⁴ This model brought together large numbers of amateur as well as professional singers to perform revered older or serious newer works, with orchestral accompaniment and for purposes so broadly and loosely defined as to be non-exclusive. As the festival format grew in popularity, singers gathered from many places with their own small or large choruses and then returned to them, sometimes establishing the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Part I: Cultural Influences
• Part II: Selected Masterworks from the Choral–Orchestral Repertoire
• Part III: The Choral Repertoire Large and Small
• Index