- tively unfamiliar, and in some cases the fine success of particular composers
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.
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
