The Chorus
The Chorus is listed in the programme, along with every member’s town of origin, divided into ‘mesdames’, ‘messrs’ and ‘masters’. The trebles consisted of 56 mesdames and 9 masters, and there were 17 contraltos (mesdames), 42 altos (messrs), 60 tenors (messrs) and 61 basses (messrs). Each section had a principal, and the majority were from Leeds. They came from: Almondbury, Armley, Barnsley, Batley, Bingley, Bradford, Canterbury, Cleckheaton, Dewsbury, Durham, Ely, Exeter, Halifax, Harewood, Harrogate, Holbeck, Holmfirth, Horsforth, Huddersfield, Idle, Kirkburton, Lockwood, Mirfield, Ossett, Peterborough, Ripon, Sheffield, Wakefield and York.
Chorus master was Robert Senior Burton, organist at Leeds Parish Church, where he made sure that the demanding Dr Hook was provided with choral services of the highest standards. He was the conductor at various times for all of the major choral societies, including Barnsley, Bradford and Huddersfield, founded the Yorkshire Choral Union in 1860 and conducted 200 singers the same year at the Crystal Palace in a programme supervised by Prince Albert. He had a reputation, in Yorkshire, for being direct and outspoken, so it would be safe to insert the intensifier ‘very’. A Leeds Intelligencer report on him stresses the positive:
We cannot close this notice of the Festival performances without paying a well-merited acknowledgement to the services of the chorus master, Mr. R. S. Burton; whose unceasing zeal and constant assiduity have produced in the choir an efficiency so excellent as to call forth most laudatory tributes from all who heard them, and to excite profound astonishment in the minds of all who had hitherto been unaccustomed to listen to Yorkshire voices.
The soloists
The soloists included the finest, most famous and most expensive of the day. Clara Anastasia Novello, a magnificent high soprano, was one of several gifted children of musician and publisher Vincent Novello. The poet Charles Lamb was entranced by her voice, dedicating a poem to her, To Clara N-----.
Susan Sunderland, local and with little professional training, the ‘Yorkshire Queen of Song’, was the other famous soprano, her devotees eagerly awaiting her brief appearance in the Saturday Messiah.
Charlotte Helen Dolby had delighted Mendelssohn. He composed the contralto part in Elijah with her voice in mind.
John Sims Reeves was the principal tenor of the mid-Victorian era. He had performed at La Scala as Edgardo in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lamermoor and had sung in the first English performance of La Damnation de Faust in 1848, with Hector Berlioz conducting.
Charles Santley, baritone, became famous as an opera singer, his career lasting until Edwardian times. With Willoughby Weiss, he was a star performer in Rossini’s Stabat Mater on the Thursday morning, less than a year after his first major appearance in London as Adam in Haydn’s Creation.
Willoughby Hunter Weiss was one of the most famous basses of the nineteenth century, performing in many premieres of new works. He had made his fortune in 1854, after setting Longfellow’s poem The Village Blacksmith to music.
Madame Novello was paid £300 for six appearances and the emerging Mr Santley received just £42 for five. Arguments about fees, which could sometimes be astronomical, were constant features throughout the nineteenth century on a Festival Committee dominated by Yorkshire businessmen accustomed to demanding ‘value for money’.
The conductor
Festival Conductor was William Sterndale Bennett, composer, frequent visitor to Düsseldorf and Leipzig, friend of Mendelssohn (who greatly influenced his work) and Professor of Music at Cambridge. Robert Schumann declared him to be the most musikalisch of all Englishmen, and an angel of a musician – repeating Pope Gregory’s pun on angli and angeli. He conducted the premiere of his cantata The May Queen in the second part of the Wednesday evening concert.
The music
The Festival was made up of a series of four morning and four evening performances, tickets for the final evening (known as the People’s Festival Concert) being offered at a reduced rate. This pattern was followed for future Festivals. The morning concerts were usually sacred choral works, often from oratorio compositions. Evening performances were two-act concerts of solo and ensemble vocal music, with orchestral works at the beginning of each part and occasional instrumental solos. The People’s Festival Concerts did not include orchestral works. The first Festival began on the Wednesday morning with Mendelssohn’s Elijah. In the evening came The May Queen, the first of many performances in the nineteenth century.
Henry Fothergill Chorley, journalist, playwright and music critic for the Athenaeum in London, provided the words. He is remembered today mainly for his obituary of Ivan Turgenev, the Russian novelist, who was offended when he read it because of Chorley’s tart comments on his work, not because he was not actually dead. The May Queen would have been perceived as appropriately patriotic.
Mr Weiss was Robin Hood and the May Queen herself was Madame Clara Novello. Miss Dolby sang the part of The Queen (definite article stressed) and would, I imagine, have cast amorous but chaste glances in the direction of the leader of the orchestra Prosper Sainton. She was to marry him two years later. The Chorus, or some of it, was expected to dance while singing:
With a laugh as we go round
To the merry, merry sound
Of the tabor and the pipe
We will frolic on the green…
Perhaps just the front row of the Mesdames performed a Greek-style dance – were the hoops removed from their crinolines?
Rossini’s Stabat Mater, Beethoven’s Mount of Olives, Spring and Summer from Haydn’s The Seasons and Handel’s Israel in Egypt were performed during the next two days, and Handel’s Messiah was the inevitable climax of the Festival on the Saturday. Mrs (not Madame) Sunderland, wearing, as always, black silk and a coral brooch, sang But thou didst not leave and If God be for us.
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