A History of the Oratorio: Volume 4 by Smither Howard E

Author:Smither, Howard E.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2012-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

The Oratorio Society at the time numbered 400; thus the festival chorus was triple its size. The additional singers came from New York, Brooklyn, the Harmonic Society of Newark, Jersey City, and Nyack (New York). For the festival, Damrosch enlarged his Symphony Society from 100 to 250 players. The hall selected was the new Seventh Regiment Armory at Park Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street, which would accommodate an audience of 10,000. The oratorios included in the festival were Messiah and Rubin-stein’s Tower of Babel. While some reviewers complained that the monumental forces did not serve the music well, most regarded the festival as a great success.169

Just before Damrosch’s festival began, his primary competitor, Theodore Thomas, announced an even bigger and better festival for the following year. In the Critic the reviewer of the Damrosch festival considered the announcement of Thomas’s festival to have been made “with most unseemly haste and more than questionable taste.”170 This was Thomas’s year of the tri-city festivals: one-week festivals in New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago in quick succession. Thomas had gained an appetite for monumentality, not only from his experience conducting the Cincinnati May Festival. In 1880 he had visited the Handel Festival in London’s Crystal Palace and had been overwhelmed by the effect of some 3,000 choristers and 500 instrumentalists. He had noted in his diary, “At last I have learned the proper way to perform Handel. One must come to England to understand him.”171 The Thomas festival of 2–6 May 1882, like Damrosch’s of the previous year, was held in the Seventh Regiment Armory. Thomas’s vocal forces exceeded those of both Damrosch’s festival and those at London’s Crystal Palace. Thomas drew 3,200 choristers from seven established choral societies (see Table VII-6). The orchestra of nearly 300 instrumentalists came from the New York Philharmonic Society, plus 150 other players from New York, and 45 from other cities, including Chicago and Cincinnati; there were 100 violins, 36 violas, 36 cellos, 40 double basses, 6 to 8 players on most of the woodwind and brass instruments, and a large percussion section.172 The only complete oratorio performed at the festival was Israel in Egypt. Later that month Thomas traveled to Cincinnati to conduct the fourth May Festival there, and then to Chicago for its first May Festival.

TABLE VII-6 Sources of Choristers for Theodore Thomas’s New York Festival of 1882

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