Bach for a Hundred Years by Larson Paul

Author:Larson, Paul
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781611460957
Publisher: Lehigh University (R&L)

The Bach Festivals represented the way music-loving Americans wanted the world to be, a world of noble ideals and beauty, a world without war. That Bethlehem was both a massive manufacturer of war weaponry to defeat Germany and a place where the greatest composer of German musical culture was kept alive made the need for the Festivals greater.

Unexpectedly, the number of males in The Choir remained basically the same throughout the war. The Bach Choir was also unaffected by the flu epidemic in the later years of the war. Because of its necessary manufacture of war materials, Bethlehem was effectively cordoned off by the U.S. military so the male population could continue producing steel and avoid the raging pandemic.

In January 1918, The Choir returned to New York to sing again with the Philharmonic Society. That program was a high point for Wolle, for it combined Wagner’s music, which he loved and admired along with Bach’s. As in Bethlehem, the concert began with the trombone choir playing offstage. When it finished the Moravian chorale, “Son of God, to Thee I Cry,” the “Kyrie Eleison” from the Mass burst forth. In fact the New York audience was greeted by a more daring innovation as Wolle had interspersed sections of the Mass with chorales. He made Bach’s Mass itself a Singstunde. The spiritual message was expanded by individual sections interconnected by relevant chorales from cantatas selected and combined by Wolle. His religious nature exceeded his reverence for Bach, and his Moravian heritage emerged in this moment of deepest integrity. Unlike the first Carnegie Hall concert, the entire evening was now a sacred service. Wolle dared to perform Bach along with Wagner’s sacred drama, “Parsifal.” The reviewer for the New York Sun wrote that, “Each number given received the whole-hearted approval of the audience.”17 From then on the Choir performed nearly annually in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.

On the afternoon of Sunday, 10 February 1918, Wolle and The Bach Choir gave their most explicitly patriotic performance of World War I. The United States Army Ambulance Service had a large training station in Camp Crane, Allentown. The invitation came from the commander of the camp, and Charles Schwab paid the expenses “incident to the present concert … in Honor of the U. S. A. A. S.”18

The concert, attended by two thousand servicemen, began with everyone singing the “National Anthems of the Allies, The Star Spangled Banner, God Save the King, and The Marseillaise Hymn.” A month earlier the Bach Choir had performed with the Philharmonic Society of New York in Carnegie Hall with the Moravian Trombone Choir. The Camp Crane concert included the same sections of the Mass, but a number of telling chorales were added. They were “The Crusaders’ Hymn” and “Rock of Ages.”

Walters gives the following moving account of the concert:

The khaki-clad audience in Recreation Hall at the camp was made up of square-shouldered young Americans, most of them college men, from every state in the Union and every territory and island possession.

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