Church Music Association Concert

“Despite the violent storm and the almost impassable condition of the streets, the first concert of the present season of the Church Music Association took place at Steinway Hall last night. The audience was, naturally enough, very small, and the ranks of the chorus were also seriously depleted.

In view of all these drawbacks, the performance was highly creditable. The various parts were well taken up, although at times the singers were overpowered by the orchestra. Bright, spirited choruses of the ‘Walpurgis Night’ awakened considerable applause, and secured one or two prompt encores. The soloists of the evening, Mrs. Gulager, Miss Henne, Mr. Leggat, and Mr. Remmertz, all rendered efficient aid, though the music falling to them was not calculated to awaken individual enthusiasm. Haydn’s Third Mass, with all its wealth of harmony and its frequent touches of melody, offers but little opportunity for personal display on the part of the solo singer. The works has been sung here before by the Church Music Association, and is popular in our Roman Catholic choirs, several of which performed it last Christmas day.

The concert opened with Sterndale Bennett’s ‘Naiad’ overture, a work full of poetic sentiment and rich orchestration.” 

“The little handful of brave people who faced the storm on Thursday night for the purpose of attending the first concert of the fourth season of the Church Music Association at Steinway Hall, were rewarded with a much better performance than they had any right under the circumstances to expect. The chourus, to be sure, was small, the altos numbering only about half their usual number, and we should say that the people on the stage, including the orchestra, were just about as many as the people in the body of the hall. Still, the singing was more correct and more spirited than it usually has been at the entertainments of this society, and the programme was excellent. The first piece was Sir William Sterndale Bennett’s ‘Najaden’ overture, a most graceful and ingenious work, charmingly conceived and beautifully scored. Haydn’s Third, or Imperial, Mass, which the Church Music Association has given once before, was repeated with considerable spirit and effect; and the concert closed with Mendelssohn’s ‘First Walpurgis Night,’ of the execution of which we can say that, though open to criticism, it showed intelligent and appreciative study. The difficult chorus, ‘Come with Torches,’ was rather too much for the singers, but the beautiful and characteristic ‘Disperse, disperse, ye gallant men’ won an encore. The solo parts in the Mass and the ‘Walpurgis Night’ were taken by Mrs. Gulager, Miss Antonia Henne, Mr. Leggat, and Mr. Remmertz.

The Church Music Association has secured for its Musical Director and Conductor Mr. Charles Edward Horsley, and English musician and composer of reputation, and son of the late William Horsley, the distinguished glee writer. Under the charge of this leader we shall expect the Association to do much better things than it has hitherto seemed to be in the way of accomplishing. Of course, Mr. Horsley’s capacity is not to be gauged by the result of his first concert given with less than half his chorus; but good judges are already impressed in his favor. There was a remark of his on the programme, which is so just, and so entirely in accord with what we have several times written, à propos of certain performances in New-York, that we shall venture to reprint it:

This Mass has already been performed by the members of the Church Music Association, so any more detailed account of it is unnecessary. It is, however, played this evening as Haydn wrote it, and without the additional instruments which were added on a former occasion. It is a great question with the present Music Director as to how far such additions are justifiable. In the case of Handel, to whose ‘Messiah,’ ‘Alexander’s Feast,’ and ‘Acis and Galatea,’ additional wind parts have been added, by Mozart and Mendelssohn, the reason is obvious. The orchestra of Handel’s time contained comparatively few wind instruments, and it well known that he himself, by his masterly accompaniments on the organ, supplied the deficiency. After his death the tradition was lost, and these additions were completely justified, and in the hands of such masters as Mozart and Mendelssohn, Handel’s ideas benefitted rather than lost by the process. In Haydn’s case, the matter becomes totally altered. In his time all the instruments now in vogue were known, and, when he desired it, used by him. Haydn was the father of modern instrumentation. Mozart, Beethoven, and all his other great contemporaries, were indebted to his symphonies and other works for their knowledge and power to carry out what he had so nobly invented, and it is absurd to suppose that, having all the musical resources of the Austrian capital at his command, he would not have employed a second flute, two clarionets, two horns, and three trombones in this ‘Imperial Mass,’ had he conceived that his music required them. Such additions are totally superfluous, and, in the Music Director's opinion, savor of such a want of reverence for the memory of a truly great man and artist, that they should at once be put aside, as in every respect to be avoided [reprinted Dwight's Journal of Music, 01/11/73, p. 364].” 

“The Church Music Association gave the first concert of its present season on Thursday evening at Steinway Hall. It has always been the fortune of this society to have its chorus seats full and an audience that crowded the hall to the doors, and this was the first exception to the rule. It was the night of the great storm—a true Walpurgis night. Mendelssohn’s cantata of that name was to be performed but evidently the subscribers were not anxious to go through an actual ‘Walpurgis Night’ for the sake of an unreal one. The consequence was that the audience on one side and the chorus and orchestra on the other about balanced each other in numbers, and the empty benches mustered in stronger force than either.

Perhaps this was not after all so much a matter of regret, since those who came were undoubtedly the most earnest and enthusiastic part of the chorus. Certainly the result was a very satisfactory one, for we never heard the association sing with so much unity, precision, correctness, and spirit, as on this occasion. Those who are accustomed to assert that a chorus of amateurs cannot sing were refuted by the facts of that evening’s performance, and certainly a part of the credit due for this belongs to the late leader of the society, Mr. Pech. We have never thought that he had the wisest of ways as a conductor; nevertheless, in listening to the admirable singing of the present chorus, we could not fail to trace its efficiency in great part to the zeal and persistency with which he has drilled it for the last three years.

Mr. Horsley, the new leader, has a name that for more than one generation has been an honored one in the musical literature of England, and one which no lover of English glee and madrigal music can hear without respect. He comes to us, therefore, with good antecedents and an excellent musical reputation.

In person Mr. Horsley is a large and powerful man, well advanced in life, not graceful in action, but of a hearty manner and genial temper, and with a firm method that gives him an easy control over his instrumental and vocal forces.

The pieces performed were [see above]. The soloists were [see above]…we speak it with due respect for the marked abilities of the other singers, Mr. Remmertz was by far the best. His singing, indeed, of the music of the Druid priest in the ‘Walpurgis Night,’ a part written by Mendelssohn for his cherished friend, Edward Devrient, was really superb, and would anywhere, even at such a Gewandhaus concert as that at which the work was first produced, have commanded admiration.

We congratulate the association on its new conductor and on the evident progress that it is making, which was very manifest in the correctness with which the fugue on the words ‘In Gloria Dei Patris,’ in the mass, was given, and also in the finish and precision with which the very difficult final choruses of the ‘Walpurgis Night’ were sung.

The efforts of the altos were especially to be commended. They were numerically by far the weakest part of the chorus, there being not more than eight of them as against some forty or more sopranos, but they sang with a promptness and assurance that very nearly made good the inequality in numbers.

There was a time when the Church Music Association was afraid of its music, and attacked a chorus with the suppressed murmur of an army of mosquitos, but that day is happily over. The society has learned to open its mouth, if we may use the expression, and that is half of the art of singing, and now there will be no more boca chiusa humming. Now let them look with a little more attention to the expression marks and all will be well. There were passages in the mass that should have shaded down with a fine diminuendo that were held out forte to the end, and generally speaking the chorus has not yet learned the full value of a pianissimo.” [reprinted Dwight's Journal of Music, 01/11/73, p. 364]

“The rehearsals of this society have been going on for some weeks, and those who have attended them will surely agree that they have never before been so enjoyable. The concert Thursday night marked the beginning of the fourth season, and dispelled some fears—all tempestuous as was the night and scanty the audience—as to the continued existence of the Association. The chorus is less numerous than in former years, but if there are fewer voices there is more voice. Some changes of personnel have taken place, but the policy of the direction remains the same; and this, in itself, is a sign of permanence. Two distinct epochs are always represented on their programmes; and though we must, and ever shall, protest against the injustice of performing classical music with its limitations as to orchestra after the more ample and resounding modern music, yet on this occasion the works selected were each so lovely, and two of them so new to a New-York audience, that it would be hypercritical to cavil. There was, to begin with, Mendelssohn’s setting of the ‘Walpurgis Night,’ a work which was with him a labor of love, and which yet taxed all his powers. His own description of it is so much better than any we could write, that we quote from his ‘Letters from Switzerland and Italy’ [quote follows].

The other new work was Sir Wm. Sterndale Bennett’s overture, ‘Nerjaden;’ and the piéce de rèsistance was Haydn’s grand Coronation Mass in D, (number three in the English, and number nine in the French edition of his works, a discrepancy which causes much confusion.) Sterndale Bennett who, like Costa, Smart, and one or two other distinguished musicians, has been knighted, is known to novel-readers as the ‘Little Star,’ in ‘Charles Auchester.’ He was, indeed, the favorite pupil of Mendelssohn. This overture is flowing and beautiful, and reminds us of the effect, though not of the form, of Mendelssohn’s ‘Melusina.’

Critics, both here and in Europe, are continually lamenting that the voices of singers are drowned in the tremendous noise of a modern orchestra. The justice of this complaint might have been perceived by any one who listened to the same singers on the same evening as they sang in the Walpurgis Night and in Haydn’s Mass, which was performed without the brass instruments. In the former, the effect of the singing was fragmentary, broken, sometimes almost painful, because the splendid and powerful orchestra , and the masterly use which Mendelssohn makes of it, continually overpowered them. In the Mass, besides that the passages which Haydn writes for the voice are bland and vocal in the highest degree, the orchestra having its fangs drawn, glides on in the most amiable manner beside the singers; so that instead of opposition and discord, we have peace and content; instead of a storm on the Brooken, it is sunshine on the plains. Haydn has been reproached for putting music so secular to the words of a Mass; but the devotional element even of religious music is, from time to time, more or less intense. Though we do not celebrate Mass on the fields of battle, as the French sometimes do, the reproach comes with a bad grace from the descendants of those old fighting Puritans who exhorted their flocks to ‘put their trust in the Lord and keep their powder dry.’ The ‘Mass in D’ was written for the coronation of an Emperor, and the singers seems less to offer praise to them to personify those stately Chamberlains and glittering soldiers, and the long array of august and princely personages who first listened to its splendid imagery and the lavish richness of its accompaniments.

This year, as last, the soloists are [see above]. We should be loth to see so fine a quartet broken up. They were somewhat overweighted in the Walpurgis Night, but in the Mass, the even balance maintained among orchestra, chorus, and the principals was something both rare and delightful. Mme. Gulager’s voice is still lovely, and her execution of the old-fashioned, slow ornamentation, which, of course, is the hardest of all, is surpassingly sweet and limpid. Miss Henné’s voice retains all its mournful beauty. Mr. Leggatt gains in power, but yields more and more to the mischievous tremolo. Mr. Remmertz’ English is equally distressing, whether he tries to articulate or gives up the attempt. His Latin is a relief, and we seldom hear anything finer than the noble ‘Qui tollis,’ (Who takest away the sins of the world,) as he declaimed it.”