Church Music Association Rehearsal

First rehearsal for the third concert of the season.

“C. M. A. takes up Beethoven’s Mass in D Thursday night. An anxious experiment. Mme. Anna Bishop expresses some doubt whether she is equal to the soprano part! It will l not surprise me if the chorus mutiny or break down.”

“Evening, with Ellie & Johny to Trinity Chapel Schoolhouse. First reading of Beethoven’s Mass in D—entirely new to nearly if not quite every member of the chorus (Ellie had once read me a few bars of it, long ago)—and a fearfully tough job of engineering. After the comparatively easy Kyrie the chorus strikes ‘hardpan,’ & has to work at it to the end. We did not quite complete the finale. At 20 minutes after ten o’clock, our regular hour for closing, people grew impatient. They were worn out, & ladies began to get up & march out. So Pech lost his temper, & threw down his baton, & the rehearsal closed abruptly. Pech is a good musician, an excellent conductor, & an admirable choral drill-master. But (as somebody says in the O. C. Kerr papers) ‘if he does not want to see a d—n fool, he had better not go into a shop where they sell looking glasses.’

Any criticism of this Mass, most roughly rendered without its solo parts, would be of as much value as one’s estimate of a great cathedral seen through a dense fog, with its clerestory & pinnacles absolutely invisible. I saw tonight merely the vague promise of a revelation of grandeur hereafter—especially in the Kyrie—Gloria (its opening)—Credo—‘ante omnia saecula’ & Benedictus.”