Church Music Association Rehearsal

Rehearsals to begin in early Oct.; forthcoming season

Announces rehearsal. “The society is to be congratulated on the renewed esteem in which it is held; subscriptions for the season already amount to over $8,000.” (A smudge makes that amount difficult to read – there is a chance it is $3,000, but $8,000 seems more likely.)

"With Ellie last evening to first private rehearsal of C. M. A. at Trinity Chapel Schoolhouse—attendance large. 280 according to Pech, but however that may be, the room was full. There are scores of applicants for a seat in the chorus, but we cannot find space for them. We have the Chapel Schoolhouse gratis, & cannot afford to hire other roomier quarters. O that I were a millionaire! But then a much larger chorus could not be accommodated in Steinway Hall—so I must wish I were tenfold a millionaire—(which is just as easily wished) & able to build a grand music hall. Haydn’s Mass in F, no. 2 was read through, & wonderfully well read for a first trial. Mme. Bishop was there, & took the soprano solo passages charmingly. I had almost forgotten what a brilliant, vigorous, & varied work this is, & never enjoyed a private rehearsal more. Perhaps a new effect was given it by the great body of voice. When I last heard it (here, in 1868), the chorus was only a dozen or twenty. The finest movements of the Mass seem of the nature that demands performance on the largest scale, to do them justice & convey their full meaning. Except always that loveliest Benedictus, which is for the soli, and which embodies somewhat of the feeling—sweet but with a shade of sadness—of an Indian summer afternoon—'when all the woods are still and twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill.' I think, with Ellie, that Pech takes that movement too slow—though he falls back on the authority of Haydn’s text. And I will make an affidavit that Haydn marked a change of time for the Hosanna that follows the Benedictus, though our copies omit any indication of such change. Nothing can be clearer than that the music demands it & assumes it."