The Choral Society

In the nineteenth century, middle-class singers pooled money for scores and turned oratorio into a mass movement.

Related

RomanticOratorioAnthem

Nineteenth-century citizens pooled money for scores and hired orchestras, moving oratorio from court theatre into the city hall.

Time and place

Berlin, 1791, where Fasch founded the Sing-Akademie, its members mostly burghers and officials. Boston, 1815, the Handel and Haydn Society. Birmingham, 1846, the premiere of Mendelssohn's Elijah with a chorus drawn from provincial societies. London, 1859, the Handel centenary, with thousands singing together.

What happened

Societies were made of merchants, clerks, teachers and their families. They rehearsed weekly, paid dues, rented rooms and elected their own committee and treasurer. Each built a library, copying and renting scores, so the repertory survived through generations of manuscript. For performances they hired professional players and soloists while singing the chorus themselves. Publishers supplied cheap vocal scores and separate chorus parts so sections could rehearse alone, with the conductor giving notes from the piano. Oratorio dominated because it had choruses and drama without staging, and its subject matter was respectable. Women took the upper parts and men the lower, fixing the mixed-voice layout.

What changed

Performance moved from court and opera house to civic association, and listeners became participants rather than ticket buyers. A town's middle class learned the canon by singing it, with Handel and Mendelssohn held in common. Choral ability became a mark of respectability and later of local and national identity. Societies kept accounts, rented scores and booked halls, the chorus master grew from accompanist into trainer, and festivals across cities boosted rail travel and score sales.

Listen for the turn

Begin with a chorus from Messiah, its entries clear and its harmony mostly blocklike, music an amateur group can steady in a few weeks. Then the crowd scenes of Elijah, where the chorus stands for a people and both dynamics and words turn dramatic. Finally Mendelssohn's two sacred choruses, short and unaccompanied, easy to rehearse by section. Before the turn this music belonged to court chapel and theatre; afterwards it belonged to dues-paying citizens. Listen for whether the entries are tidy, the measure amateur groups care about most.

Related

The turn belongs to Romantic, with genres at Oratorio and Anthem, and the 1846 premiere marking the peak of the line.

Sources

• Grove Music Online 的 Choral society 条目，用于核对柏林歌唱学院与英美合唱协会的成立
• William Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste（Cambridge University Press），用于核对合唱节与曲目的形成

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.