"Bach Choir" redirects here. For other Bach choirs, see List of Bach choirs.
The Bach Choir is a large independent musical organisation founded in London, England in 1876 to give the first performance of J. S. Bach's Mass in B minor in Britain.[1]
Formed in 1875 for the purpose of giving the first complete British performance of J. S. Bach's Mass in B minor,[1] the Bach Choir continued and developed to become one of the world's leading amateur choirs.
The original idea for the choir came from Arthur Duke Coleridge, a young lawyer and outstanding amateur tenor who became acquainted with the Mass while a student at Leipzig, where he studied music along with the young Charles Villiers Stanford.[11] He formed a committee to promote a British performance of the Mass, recruiting George Grove and John Stainer to serve on it. They appointed as musical director Otto Goldschmidt, the husband of Jenny Lind (the "Swedish Nightingale") who, as a former pupil of Felix Mendelssohn in Leipzig, had a good knowledge of the music of Bach. Within six months a choir was assembled and two performances of the Mass, conducted by Goldschmidt, were given on 26 April and 8 May 1876.[11]
The concerts' success encouraged the formation of a permanent choir with Goldschmidt as its first musical director.[11] The choir's declared aim was "the practice and performance of choral works of excellence and of various schools".[11] Initially, members were drawn exclusively from the upper levels of Victorian society, the social stratum in which Coleridge and Goldschmidt moved. Among the singing members was Princess Christian, the fifth child of Queen Victoria;[12] and among the founder-members, W.E. Gladstone.[12]
The exclusivity of the choir was perpetuated as recruits had to be proposed and seconded by existing members and approved by the committee.[12] Of greater concern for the choir's future health, however, were the lack of a requirement for regular re-audition, and a five o'clock rehearsal time. While the latter ensured that members' evening social lives were not disturbed, rehearsal attendance by tenors and basses with business interests soon became a cause for concern. A positive feature of the wealthy membership, however, was that programming could be more adventurous without the need to resort to performances of the popular oratorio repertoire to secure essential funds.[citation needed]
The repertoire in the Goldschmidt years was biased towards motets and Renaissance church music, a reflection of his particular interests; but the connection with Bach was maintained by regular performances of the Mass in B Minor and some of the cantatas.
Goldschmidt resigned in 1885 to be replaced by Stanford, organist of Trinity College, Cambridge and conductor of the Cambridge University Musical Society, who had recently been appointed professor of composition at the Royal College of Music. Stanford expanded the repertoire with programmes which included the Brahms Requiem, excerpts from Parsifal, the Verdi Requiem and other contemporary works. The choir always had connections with royalty, and Queen Victoria became patron in 1879. To mark her golden jubilee in 1887, the choir invited Hubert Parry to compose its first commissioned work, the choral ode Blest Pair of Sirens.
20th century
By the end of the 19th century, the choir faced a crisis. Deteriorating performance standards—due primarily to an ageing membership not subject to re-audition, and inadequate rehearsal time—produced mounting financial losses. Membership was opened to all social groups, and regular re-tests for existing members were implemented. Stanford resigned in 1902 to take up the conductorship of the Leeds Festival. He was replaced by Henry Walford Davies, who rebuilt the choir, then handed it over to Hugh Allen in 1907.
Allen inherited a choir that included Ralph Vaughan Williams and later Adrian Boult among its singing members. He had already gained a reputation as a choral conductor at Ely and Oxford, and brought immense energy to the task. Under him a number of first London performances were given, including Toward the Unknown Region and A Sea Symphony.[11] He steered the choir through the difficult years of the First World War; and in 1916, presided over the first performance of Parry's Songs of Farewell.
The growing pressure of Allen's commitments obliged him to resign in 1921, to be succeeded by Vaughan Williams. While he remained faithful to the tradition of the performance of Bach — in particular, the St Matthew Passion — Vaughan Williams also gave audiences opportunities to hear works by contemporary composers, including his good friend Gustav Holst; and in 1926 he conducted the choir in the first London performance of his oratorio Sancta Civitas.
In October 1927, the start of the 1927/28 season, Vaughan Williams announced his intention to resign to concentrate on composing. He gave a season's notice, giving the choir what was considered ample time to find a replacement. Probably at Vaughan Williams's prompting, the choir approached Holst, who had established a reputation as a first-rate choral trainer and teacher as director of music at St Paul's Girls' School, Hammersmith, and at Morley College. Holst confirmed his acceptance by letter on 16 December 1927, and it was arranged for him to start at the beginning of the new season in October 1928. By May 1928, however, his health had deteriorated, requiring him to withdraw his acceptance. With a new season fast approaching, the choir was in trouble. Malcolm Sargent was approached; he was interested in the role, but negotiations broke down over his insistence on using deputy choirmasters to take rehearsals that conflicted with his other engagements.[11]
Many choir members were already lobbying for Adrian Boult (who believed the musical director should take all rehearsals); and, following the breakdown of negotiations with Sargent, he was approached. Although he was already heavily committed, Boult accepted the appointment; and in June 1928, the handover from Vaughan Williams (who was elected a vice-president of the choir) was finalised at the July 1928 AGM.[13] Although only in charge for four seasons, Boult produced performances of high quality, and introduced challenging contemporary works. His lasting legacy was to initiate annual complete performances of the St Matthew Passion in English,[11] a tradition that continues to this day.[14]
Boult was followed in 1932 by Reginald Jacques, who had been a pupil of Hugh Allen at Oxford. In a stay of twenty-eight years he introduced the traditional annual Carol Concert, ensured that activities continued without a break during the Second World War, and in 1947-48 conducted the choir in its first recording – a somewhat abridged performance of the St Matthew Passion with Kathleen Ferrier as the contralto soloist. Despite several movements of the piece being cut, the recording still filled forty-two sides of the old style 78 rpm discs. Ferrier had made her debut in Messiah with the choir in 1943.[12]
Following the sudden departure of Jacques in 1960 after a heart attack, the musical directorship went to David Willcocks, director of music at King's College, Cambridge. He was soon pointing the choir in new directions, introducing important contemporary works including Honegger's King David, Delius's Sea Drift and Janáček's Glagolitic Mass. He undertook a number of recordings, including a performance of Britten's War Requiem conducted by the composer, which sold 200,000 copies in its first five months. A series of foreign tours was also arranged to the United States, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand, France, Sweden and South Africa. The choir gave the Italian premiere of the War Requiem at La Scala, Milan.[12]
1 2 The first known complete performance had been given in Leipzig by the Riedel-Verein on 10 April 1859. See "Bach's Greatest Enigma - The Mass in B minor", BBC Radio 3, accessed 19 June 2011. Sections of the score had been given in Britain under conductors including John Hullah before 1876, but this was the first complete performance in Britain: see "Bach's Mass in B Minor", The Times, 11 May 1876, p. 5
Sir Adrian Cedric Boult, CH was a British conductor. Brought up in a prosperous mercantile family, he followed musical studies in England and at Leipzig, Germany, with early conducting work in London for the Royal Opera House and Sergei Diaghilev's ballet company. His first prominent post was conductor of the City of Birmingham Orchestra in 1924. When the British Broadcasting Corporation appointed him director of music in 1930, he established the BBC Symphony Orchestra and became its chief conductor. The orchestra set standards of excellence that were rivalled in Britain only by the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO), founded two years later.
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Sir David Valentine Willcocks, was a British choral conductor, organist, composer and music administrator. He was particularly well known for his association with the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, which he directed from 1957 to 1974, making frequent broadcasts and recordings. Several of the descants and carol arrangements he wrote for the annual service of Nine Lessons and Carols were published in the series of books Carols for Choirs which he edited along with Reginald Jacques and John Rutter. He was also director of the Royal College of Music in London.
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Sancta Civitas is an oratorio by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Written between 1923 and 1925, it was his first major work since the Mass in G minor two years previously. Vaughan Williams began working on the piece from a rented furnished house in the village of Danbury, Essex, found for him by his former pupil, Cecil Armstrong Gibbs.
Hymnus Paradisi is a choral work by Herbert Howells for soprano and tenor soloists, mixed chorus, and orchestra. The work was inspired in part by the death from polio of his son Michael in 1935. Howells wrote the work from 1936 to 1938, drawing on material from the then-unpublished Requiem of 1932, but then retained the music privately, without public performance. Howells maintained later in life that Ralph Vaughan Williams convinced him to allow the work to be performed publicly at the Three Choirs Festival. However, his former pupil and biographer Paul Spicer contends that Howells first showed the music to Herbert Sumsion, organist of Gloucester Cathedral, who in turn showed it to Gerald Finzi, and that only after these two expressed their enthusiasm did Howells show the music to Vaughan Williams. The title 'Hymnus Paradisi' was suggested by Sumsion. The work received its successful premiere at the Festival in 1950. The score was published in 1951.
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Bath Bach Choir, formerly The City of Bath Bach Choir (CBBC), is based in Bath, Somerset, England, and is a registered charity. Founded in 1946 by Cuthbert Bates, who also became a founding father of the Bath Bach Festival in 1950, the choir's original aim was to promote the music of Johann Sebastian Bach via periodic music festivals. Bates – an amateur musician with a great love and understanding of this composer's works – was also the CBBC's principal conductor and continued in this role until his sudden death, in April 1980. This untimely exit pre-empted his planned retirement concert performance of J. S. Bach's Mass in B minor, scheduled for July of the same year, and effectively ended the first period of the choir's history.
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Worcester Festival Choral Society (WFCS) is an independent, SATB (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) choir of around 150 amateur singers that presents classical choral concerts at Worcester Cathedral, Worcester. The conductor is Samuel Hudson (Worcester Cathedral’s Director of Music) and the accompanist is Nicholas Freestone (Worcester Cathedral’s Assistant Director of Music). The Chairman is Susan White. The President is The Lord Bishop of Worcester and Senior Vice President is The Dean of Worcester.
References
Elkin, Robert (1944). Queen's Hall 1893–1941. London: Ryder. OCLC604598020.
Keen, Basil (2008). The Bach Choir: the First Hundred Years. Aldershot: Ashgate
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