In the years just before the turn of this century, an up-to-date, comprehensive book in English about the history of choral music in any period was not to be found. The situation began to change with the appearance of David DeVenney’s Varied Carols: A Survey of American Choral Literature.Footnote ¹ Nick Strimple’s Choral Music in the Twentieth Century Footnote ² and Choral Music in the Nineteenth Century Footnote ³ were surveys of a broader scope, and improvements on their predecessors. Both mention thousands of works, large and small, provide some cultural context and concise, often witty, commentary and include good bibliographies, but no footnotes to lead us toward more detailed information. The landscape changed again with Dennis Shrock’s Choral Repertoire.Footnote ⁴ Shrock takes us from the Middle Ages to the present in a single volume, touching on hundreds of composers and thousands of works. He covers much ground, emphasizing historical background but providing little analysis or evaluation of individual works. The breadth is strikingly comprehensive, but there is little depth, and the enormous scope of Shrock’s research is surprisingly left unsupported by any notes or bibliography.

With Nineteenth-Century Choral Music, edited by Donna M. Di Grazia, we have an entirely different sort of contribution. This anthology of 31 chapters by 27 different musicologists not only examines European and American choral works from across the century, but it also focuses frequently on the cultural phenomenon of choral singing as it blossomed to enormous proportions, both reflecting and generating significant social transformations. Despite the explosion of opera and enormous achievements in symphonic composition, the nineteenth century appears here as an era during which Western musical culture was dominated by the activity of choruses.

This volume stands apart from other recent choral surveys in a number of ways. The contributors are specialists in nineteenth-century music, and all are in complete command of the current literature in their own areas. Each chapter appears with extensive notes and a select bibliography; most refer to numerous nineteenth-century sources as well as to the most recent scholarship. The detail and imagination found here rise far beyond the level of a textbook survey for a course in choral literature.

The plan of this book, like many others that need to provide a wide view of a long period, is a hybrid. Part I, ‘Cultural Influences’, deals with the various forces that worked together to make choruses a significant social phenomenon, and relates this choral explosion to its place in connection to the symphony and the world of opera. Parts II and III deal more specifically with repertoire. In Part II, ‘Selected Masterworks from the Choral-Orchestral Repertoire’, D. Kern Holoman provides extended discussions of 10 major works. Part III, ‘Choral Repertoire Large and Small’, is by far the largest section. This section features multi-chapter treatments of six main European regions (Germany and Austria; France; Italy; Northern Europe, including the British Isles and Nordic Countries; Eastern Europe, including Russia; and ‘The Iberian World’ of Spain, Latin America and the Philippines), and the United States. In addition to these national surveys, Part III contains 13 chapters focusing on the works of individual composers.

Some of the most imaginative contributions are those that set the cultural context for the century’s explosion of choral activity. Celia Applegate’s wide-ranging introductory chapter, ‘The Building of Community through Choral Singing’, explores the phenomena of large choral societies, frequent enormous festivals, and the political and social forces that drove them. These are balanced by discussions of the even more numerous smaller Catch Clubs and Liedertafeln, and the place of choral singing in the home and church. Politics, cultural aspiration, family and worship all coalesce in group singing. Ryan Minor’s essay on the specific character of the movement in Germany and Austria broadens the discussion to the role of nature, food, alcohol, political inclusion and cultural education (Bildung) in the spread of choruses. Minor makes the important point that choral societies not only predated orchestral institutions in many German cities, but for years also sponsored the most important orchestral performances of symphonic music, as well as joint choral-orchestral works.

James Garrett provides a detailed context for the peculiarly successful English choral industry, dominated by performances of Handel for half the century, and then by a flood of new works, both large and small, of both lesser inspiration and lesser longevity. France might seem a choral backwater during this period, compared to Germany and England, with little repertoire surviving to the present day beyond a few works of Berlioz and Fauré, but Claire Rowden paints the picture of a vibrant tapestry of activity. The post-revolutionary revival of church activity under Napoleon was accompanied by a robust movement to revive the sacred music of earlier ages, displaying an intensity that at least matched that of the Bach revival in Germany. The restoration of chant in the Solesmes monastery was complemented by the vigorous efforts to revive earlier repertoires by the Tuileries Chapel under Le Sueur and Cherubini, the Institution royale de la musique religieuse under Choron, the Societé des concerts de musique vocale classique, the École Niedermeyer, and, late in the century, the Schola Cantorum under d’Indy, along with numerous cathedral choirs outside Paris. In addition to all this, the robust Orphéon movement promoted choral singing in schools, and fostered ‘3,000 provincial Orphéon choirs […] involving about 140,000 singers’ (p. 208). If the numerous oratorios and cantatas of Gounod, Franck, Massenet and Saint-Saëns are rarely heard today, their fate is hardly worse than that of the majority of English and German works from the period.

Rowden’s chapter, along with the generous space given to French composers, is one of the book’s major strengths, and is a step toward redressing the Germano-centric approach that characterizes many discussions of nineteenth-century music in English. Donna M. Di Grazia’s own contribution is an excellent extended chapter on Berlioz, the longest chapter here on any single composer. While Brahms is given 13 pages, Berlioz receives 34, in addition to Holoman’s detailed discussions of both the Grand messe des morts and La Damnation de Faust in Part II.

The varied atmospheres that prevailed for choral music on the peripheries of Europe during the century largely set the stage for what is still seen today in these countries. Harald Herresthal outlines broad-based choral activity throughout Scandanavian schools, churches and civic organizations, and several authors explore the distinct repertoires of Eastern Europe. In ‘A Tale of Survival: Choral Music in Italy’, Francesco Izzo portrays a musical scene where opera dominated the musical economy, but where some prominent theatre composers kept a foot in church music as well. Saverio Mercadante, for example, retained his position as maestro di cappella at the cathedral in Novara, even as ‘he received a fee four times his annual salary from the cathedral for writing a single new opera’ (p. 306). Izzo explores Rossini’s Stabat Mater in some detail, and makes a case for the largely forgotten late-century conservative oratorios of Lorenzo Perosi, who served as music director at both St Mark’s in Venice and the Sistine Chapel.

N. Lee Orr’s wide-ranging discussion of choral culture in the United States encompasses amateur church and community choruses on the frontier, the educational achievements of Lowell Mason, concert activity in large cities, the development of shape-note tradition, the tremendous influence of immigration from Europe, and the growth of African-American ensembles such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers and their emulators. The choral contributions of Dudley Buck, John Knowles Paine, Horatio Parker and a host of others are also discussed in some detail.

Many readers will look first to the material on the great choral-orchestral works that lie at the heart of our current canon of nineteenth-century choral repertoire. In Part II, Holoman discusses five works with liturgical roots – Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, and the Requiems of Berlioz, Brahms, Verdi and Fauré – and a diverse group of five works with ‘secular and non-liturgical texts’ (p. 76) – the oratorios Elijah and The Dream of Gerontius, the Berlioz Damnation of Faust, Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, and Dvořák’s Stabat Mater. These discussions are concise and rich. The historical context of each work is explored in detail, but Holoman’s emphasis is slanted toward the practical. In some ways, Part II seems like part of a different book: a practical ‘conductor’s guide’, with information such as detailed tables of contents, timings, orchestrations, available editions, scriptural references (for Elijah), descriptions of premieres, and specific performance challenges for each work. As with the rest of the book, Holoman’s discussions are referenced with copious notes and suggested further reading.

Any attempt to deal with such a vast repertoire will have problems. Most of the composers whose major works are dealt with in Part II (Beethoven, Berlioz, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Fauré and Dvořák) are each allotted a separate chapter in Part III, as well they might be. But this approach at times results in coverage that seems almost random, and a number of important achievements are omitted almost entirely. While the seminal influence of Beethoven’s Ninth is acknowledged again and again, there are only two relatively superficial paragraphs on the piece itself. Schumann’s towering Szenen aus Goethes Faust does not make the cut for the ten top choral-orchestral works, but Roe-Min Kok’s brief Schumann chapter focuses on a small assortment of minor part songs and ballads, so we are left with no discussion of the work that Schumann considered his greatest achievement.

Many will find it easy to accept the inclusion of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony (1906), as it ‘lowers the curtain on the Long Century, its compositional priorities rooted thoroughly in Romanticism’, in Holomon’s view (p. 103). But surely Haydn’s great achievements at the century’s other end, with The Creation (1798), The Seasons (1801), and the final masses, set the stage for the explosive oratorio industry that flourished throughout the century. ‘The Representation of Chaos’ from The Creation can lay a strong claim to being one of the first great achievements of musical Romanticism. Haydn was universally acknowledged as Europe’s Grand Master in 1800, and the enormous influence of his two major oratorios is alluded to in several chapters; it is hard to defend their complete omission here, especially in view of the discussions of lesser works of composers with limited lasting influence such as Augusta Holmès and Félicien David.

Despite these shortcomings, this book is a superb achievement. No other survey of the choral repertoire of the nineteenth century approaches it in breadth, or in the thoroughness of its documentation. No other book attempts to explore in such depth the choral culture of the nineteenth century – the era that established the chorus as we know it. This volume will likely serve as the central reference for the study of choral music of this period for the foreseeable future.