Oratorio Society of New York - History

History

The Oratorio Society presented its first concert on December 3, 1873. One year later, on Christmas night, the Society began what has become an unbroken tradition of annual performances of Handel's Messiah. These have been held at Carnegie Hall since its opening in 1891.

In 1884 Andrew Carnegie joined the Society's board of directors, serving as its president from 1888 to 1919. Three years after joining the board (perhaps at the suggestion of his wife, Louise Whitfield Carnegie), an alto singing with the Society, or perhaps at the suggestion of young Walter Damrosch, who had taken over as conductor of the Society after his father's death in 1885, Carnegie decided to add his support to a fund the Society had begun several years earlier, the goal of which was to build a hall suitable for the performance of choral music. He engaged a fellow board member, the architect William Tuthill, to design the "Music Hall", now known as Carnegie Hall. During the five-day festival in May 1891 that inaugurated the new hall, the Society performed under the batons of Walter Damrosch and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in the first of more than a century of performances in its artistic home. Among the Society's many ground-breaking programs was one in April 1923 when, in conjunction with the experimental radio station, WEAF, the Oratorio Society presented the first choral concert broadcast from Carnegie Hall. In the years following, it was quite active in furthering the popularity of this new medium.

The Oratorio Society has premiered works as diverse as Brahms' Ein deutsches Requiem (1877), Berlioz' Roméo et Juliette (1882), a full-concert production of Wagner's Parsifal at the Metropolitan Opera House (1886), Tchaikovsky's a cappella Legend and Pater Noster (1891) and Eugene Onegin (1908), the now-standard version of The Star-Spangled Banner (1917; it became the national anthem in 1931), Bach's Mass in B Minor (1927), Antonín Dvořák's St. Ludmila (1993), and Benjamin Britten's The World of the Spirit (1998), as well as works by Handel, Liszt, Schütz, Schubert, Debussy, Elgar, Saint-Saëns, and many others, including contemporary composers.