Cincinnati May Festival
The Cincinnati May Festival is a two-week annual choral festival, held in May in Cincinnati, Ohio, US.
The 1873 Festival[edit]
"The orchestra is German; the music three-fourths German, and the other fourth exotic; scarcely half the singers were native-born; but, despite all this, it is thoroughly American, for nothing but that attenuated and intensified form of Anglo-Saxon called the Yankee could ever have supplied the nerve-force needed to carry on such a mammoth affair."[9] Performances included repertoire that was overwhelmingly German. Handel, Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart comprised the first two concerts. Of the sixty works on the seven concerts, only five were by composers not born in a German-speaking country. The matinee concerts consisted largely of arias, art songs, and light orchestral works, including isolated movements of symphonies, Strauss waltzes, and overtures. Thomas's evening concerts were more formal and consisted of major vocal and choral works, including Handel's Dettingen Te Deum, scenes from Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, along with purely symphonic works and concert arias.[10]
The 1875 Festival[edit]
A second May Festival took place at Saengerfest Hall in 1875, and presented the American premieres of Bach's Magnificat and Brahms's Triumphlied. During this festival, Cincinnati's usual springtime thunderstorms pelted the leaky tin roof of the hall with rain and hail, as they had done to a lesser degree in 1873. The cavernous hall acted as a resonating chamber and Thomas had to stop the concerts on more than one occasion to let the storms pass. Two other problems with the hall were mentioned in the press reports of the first festival, which no doubt persisted in 1875. The reporter from the Gazette mentioned that the temperature in the hall was too warm. The situation was 'promptly remedied by a member of the executive committee who crashed out the glass from every window whose frame was wedged too tight in its place to be readily removed.' Another problem arose as the audience, estimated at four thousand with two thousand more in the streets, seems to have grown somewhat frustrated by the crowded conditions in the hall and complained that allowing one thousand people to stand in the aisles 'sorely disappoints ticket-holders who selected their seats on the aisles with especial purpose.'[11]
Music Hall and the 1878 Festival[edit]
Kentucky-born railroad entrepreneur Reuben Springer was so annoyed by the hall problems that he made the initial $125,000 donation to create a matching fund to enable the construction of a new music hall.[11]
The area chosen for the new Music Hall was close to the Community Hospital, Insane Asylum, and the Pest House . When inmates or patients expired, they were interred in Potter's Field, the present site of Music Hall. Over two hundred wagon loads of bones were moved to Spring Grove Cemetery and reburied in a mass grave.[12]
Construction for the hall began on May 1, 1877, just a year before the third May Festival was to begin. It was dedicated on May 14 at the first concert of the 1878 May Festival. (125) Tickets for the first festival held in Music Hall were, "$2 for a single reserved seat, $1 for standing room, and $10 dollars for the entire set of seven concert."[13] Cincinnati's May Festival has taken place in Springer Auditorium since 1878.[14]
Edward Elgar in Cincinnati[edit]
After the death of Theodore Thomas in 1905, the 1906 May Festival featured British composer Sir Edward Elgar conducting his oratorio The Dream of Gerontius at the final concert. ... Elgar was the most prominent British composer and \his music was popular in the U.S. He conducted the second, fifth, and sixth concerts of the festival, after spending the preceding two weeks rehearsing his music with the performers.[15]
Theodore Thomas had previously conducted Gerontius at the 1904 May Festival, and its success and the fame of the composer may have drawn the board of directors to consider Elgar for a guest conductor and celebrity at the upcoming festival.[16]
Enraging the chorus, Lawrence Maxwell Jr., vice-president of the May Festival Association stated that he was "against the giving of the memorial concert, saying that it had not the sanction of the board, that the program was a log of 'hash,' and that it would make Thomas turn in his grave to listen to it." ...The Festival Board, in an act of either reconciliation or humiliation towards the chorus, planned its own memorial concert to open the 1906 May Festival. The chorus responded in a letter by demanding Maxwell's resignation, adding that "if the Board of Directors do not find this request acceptable, we find no other course open to us than to insist that this communication shall constitute the resignation of the chorus, to take effect at once." The May Festival Chorus was soon disbanded, and the Board of Directors chose Maxwell as the next president of the May Festival Association.[17]
In the midst of the upheaval, the festival reorganized its board and established a marketing plan for the 1906 concerts to choose "[Frank] Van der Stucken as festival conductor, and to depend upon Sir Edward Elgar as a foreign attraction." Frank van der Stucken was the conductor of the recently formed Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and the board decided that the Cincinnati orchestra would play in the 1906 May Festival for the first time.[17]
The previous festivals had had open rehearsals and many other public opportunities for Cincinnatians to meet and mingle with the stars, but this would not be the case in 1906. With a completely restructured program, Frank Van der Stucken anticipated rehearsals would be full of personnel problems and musical challenges and considered options that would allow the performers to focus on the music.[18]
The final concert was held on the same evening, and the program consisted of The Dream of Gerontius followed by Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.[19]
The May Festival and Cincinnati School Music[edit]
However, perhaps the appearances of massed school choirs most valued by Cincinnatians were those in the then-biennial May Festivals. At the first May Festivals (1873 and 1875) a large chorus of pupils and teachers from the city's intermediate, secondary, and normal schools presented music learned in their public school classes. Beginning in 1882, planners of the festivals began working student choral ensembles into the regular festival repertoire, such as Bach's St. Matthew Passion, Berlioz's Damnation of Faust, and Te Deum, Handel's Judas Maccabeus, or Rubinstein's Tower of Babel. In 1897 a Children's May Festival, utilizing some 2,000 students from the city schools, presented Franz Abt's Cinderella.
Choruses of school children continue to be welcome participants in such major works as Orff's Carmina Burana, Walton's Belshazzar's Feast, Mahler's Symphony No. 3, and Britten's War Requiem. All these accomplishments would have been impossible had not Cincinnati schools, both public and parochial, introduced music into their curricula.[20]