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with it is comparatively unknown. Even if we allow for the obvious fact that choral effects cannot vie with orchestral in variety and in certain kinds of intensity, it is only fair to remember also that choral music has not even yet attained the artistic eminence that is possible, simply because in most places it has not been given similar opportunity.
 * tively unfamiliar, and in some cases the fine success of particular composers

One element in this development was the multiplication in all the leading musical countries of singing clubs and societies. Whether this was a cause or an effect may be debated, but the fact is impressive in any case. One reason for it was the desire to do justice to some of the older composers, especially Handel and Haydn. But in part it was a spontaneous expression of the new sense of music as a popular fine art, having exceptional educational and social applications, especially as it was seen that in choral music large numbers of amateurs can personally engage in the production of extremely artistic results. The choral concert and festival, accordingly, became common, constituting a new opportunity for the composer and a new means of contact between musical art and the public. To meet the demand thus presented there was a marked increase not only in oratorios, psalms and sacred cantatas, but also in similar works upon secular texts, including manifold settings of brief lyrics and odes. Many of these latter, of course, were written in part-song style, paralleling the simpler solo songs, but the tendency increased to build them out into complex works with orchestral accompaniment and with some solo passages. In all this we see an effort to strike a fresh balance between vocal and instrumental music of an elaborate sort.

The Berlin Singakademie, founded by Fasch in 1790-2, was the prototype of a long series of choral societies, the earliest of which followed in this order:—Leipsic and Stettin in 1800, Münster in 1804, Dresden in 1807, Zurich in 1808, Vienna in 1812-4, Potsdam in 1814, Bremen in 1815, Chemnitz and Hall (Swabia) in 1817, Innsbruck in 1818, Frankfort in 1818-21, Hamburg and Güstrow in 1819, Jever in 1820, Oldenburg in 1821, Cassel in 1823, etc.

The German institution known as the Liedertafel or male choral club began in 1808 under Zelter as an offshoot from the Berlin Singakademie. Similar clubs soon followed elsewhere, as at Frankfurt-an-der-Oder and Leipsic in 1815, at Magdeburg and Weida in 1818, at Berlin ('Junior') in 1819, at Dessau in 1821, at Hamburg and Danzig in 1823, at Königsberg and Leipsic (University) in 1824, etc. At first the aim was to gather small, exclusive groups of experts—a modern analogue to the