118 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR
AMERICA’S FIRST ORATORIO SOCIETY
On Christmas night in 1815, a concert took place in Boston’s Stone Chapel that
marked a new stage in Americans’ recognition of music as an art. Some months
earlier, the Boston Handel and Haydn Society had been formed to improve
sacred music performance and promote the sacred works of eminent Euro-
pean masters. The society’s fi rst public performance, attended by an estimated
one thousand, included excerpts from Haydn’s Creation and Handel’s Israel in
Eg ypt, as well as the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. According to a
Boston newspaper report, “The excitements to loud applause were frequently
irresistible.”
The concert was a landmark event in the role it gave to composers. Reformers
of psalmody had long been praising European musical science, but their interest
lay in congregational singing, not in the complexities of oratorios: large-scale
religious works for chorus, solo singers, and orchestra. The Boston Handel and
Haydn Society set out to establish a place for Handel and Haydn as composers
of oratorios, placing fresh emphasis on the music itself. Boston audiences could
now experience musical sound that was both artistic and sacred in its evocative
power.
The society’s fi rst concert was also unusual in bringing sacred music to an
audience that entered the church as paying listeners and responded by clapping
rather than praying. Thus began a tradition of oratorio performances that laid
the groundwork for a concert life new to the United States.
As noted in chapter 3, Lowell Mason’s offer to split the proceeds of his tune-
book with the Handel and Haydn Society, which acted as publisher, proved a
fi nancial windfall for the partners. The Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection
of Church Music, which appeared in seventeen editions in as many years, begin-
ning in 1822, enriched each by about $12,000 and helped underwrite the soci-
ety’s concert expenses. By 1827, when Mason moved to Boston as the society’s
president, the Handel and Haydn Society was Boston’s foremost musical organi-
zation. It is still in existence today.
By publishing Mason’s tunebook, the society was helping to raise the stand-
ard of singing in public worship, the era’s main form of democratic music mak-
ing. But in its concerts, the Handel and Haydn Society also showed Bostonians
the quality and impact sacred choral singing could achieve. Except for a few solo-
ists, the singers performing Handel’s and Haydn’s “scientifi c” music were ama-
teurs, most likely drawn to oratorio by the sacred subject matter. Once enlisted,
however, choristers were asked to sing demanding voice parts artistically and on
pitch, with decent vocal sound and clear pronunciation.
Just as reformers of psalmody took up the cause of European standards and
“correct taste,” some linked a European musical standard to refi nement and gen-
tility. But in the Handel and Haydn Society, composers were more than symbols
of refi nement; they were the authors of works that singers and listeners were
coming to know through experience. Members of the chorus could seek reli-
gious exaltation while trying to improve their singing and learning great music.
Thus the society promoted artistic skills in the name of religion, not refi nement.
Sacred subject matter, citizen involvement, and self-fi nancing grounded the
musical work of the Handel and Haydn Society in democratic values.the Handel and
Haydn Societyoratoriosdemocratic values172028_05_106-131_r3_ko.indd 118 23/01/13 8:21 PM