Early Years
Formed originally in 1875 for the sole purpose of giving the first complete British performance of J. S. Bach's Mass in B minor, the Bach Choir then continued and developed so that today it has become one of the leading amateur choirs in the world.
The original idea came from Arthur Duke Coleridge, a young lawyer and outstanding amateur tenor, who had become acquainted with the Mass while a student at Leipzig, where he studied music along with the young Charles Villiers Stanford. He formed a committee to promote a British performance of the Mass, recruiting George Grove and John Stainer to serve on it. They appointed as musical director Otto Goldschmidt, the husband of Jenny Lind (the "Swedish Nightingale") who, as a former pupil of Felix Mendelssohn in Leipzig, had a good knowledge of the music of Bach. Within six months a choir was recruited and two performances of the Mass, conducted by Goldschmidt, were given on 26 April and 8 May 1876.
The success of the concerts encouraged the formation of a permanent choir with Goldschmidt as the first musical director. The declared aim of the choir was "the practice and performance of choral works of excellence and of various schools". Initially membership was exclusively drawn from the upper levels of Victorian society since this was the social group in which both Coleridge and Goldschmidt moved. Among the singing members was Princess Christian, the fifth child of Queen Victoria. Among the founder-members was W.E. Gladstone. This exclusivity was perpetuated because recruits had to be proposed and seconded by existing members and approved by the committee. Of greater concern for the future health of the choir, however, were the lack of a requirement for regular re-audition and a five o'clock rehearsal time. While the latter ensured that the evening social life of the members was not disturbed, rehearsal attendance by tenors and basses with business interests soon became a cause for concern. A positive feature of the wealthy membership, however, was that programming could be more adventurous without the need to resort to performances of the popular oratorio repertoire to secure essential funds.
The repertoire in the Goldschmidt years was biased towards motets and Renaissance church music, a reflection of his particular interest, but the connection with Bach was maintained by regular performances of the Mass in B minor and some of the cantatas.
Goldschmidt resigned in 1885 to be replaced by Stanford, organist of Trinity College, Cambridge and conductor of the Cambridge University Musical Society, who had recently been appointed professor of composition at the Royal College of Music. Stanford expanded the repertoire with programmes which included the Brahms Requiem, excerpts from Parsifal, the Verdi Requiem and other contemporary works. From the beginning there had been a connection with royalty and Queen Victoria became patron in 1879. To mark her golden jubilee in 1887 the choir invited Hubert Parry to compose its first commissioned work for inclusion in the concert programme. In response Parry produced the choral ode Blest Pair of Sirens.
Read more about this topic: The Bach Choir
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