Cincinnati Festival

Music weeks and festivals have raised loud ensembles all over the country during the closing season days. The most notable undoubtedly is the Cincinnati Music Festival. This function is wrapped with the triple dignities of age, bigness and merit. Cincinnati celebrates its Golden Anniversary Festival, the 50th yearly invocation of tuneful sound. The first festival was directed by Theodore Thomas in 1873. All of these events have been large and ceremonious.

Mendelssohn's ever favored Elijah, intoned by the regular festival chorus of 325 and an added band of 80 men and women singers from the National Cash Register Company, with 48 professional vocalists to chant t he solo parts so that the quartettes were themselves fair sized choruses--that began Cincinnati's homage to Apollo for 1923. It was prodigious--for mere magnitude. Imagine a dozen soprano voices singing a trill in unison, as they did. The performance was very good, and received universal praise. It deserved it.

The Cincinnati singers were trained by Alfred Hartzell. The performance of Elijah was conducted by Vanderstucken. An audience of nearly 4,000 people, from all over Ohio and even from remote parts of the United States, gathered to listen.

The highest achievement of the Festival came with Bach's B minor Mass. The chorus was still as large as in the Mendelssohn work, but the solo parts were really sung solo and by artists of note. A gathering of dignitaries celebrated the occasion. The Bach masterpiece is enormously difficult with its intricate weaving of voices in the manner of the old ecclesiastical polyphony. It is likewise immensely fine. Some critics rate it as Bach's greatest work. Others call it the greatest Mass ever written, with Beethoven's Mass in D as the only possible disputant for the honor, which leads to the interesting and meaningful consideration that what is possibly the highest piece of Roman liturgical music was written by the devout Lutheran, Bach, who was capelmeister at St. Thomas' Evangelical Church in Leipzig! The moral seems to be that the Mass is so superb a musical form, such a tempting subject for the composer of music, that it quite transcends any points of doctrine.

Among the operas rumored for production at the Metropolitan next year are Weber's Die Freischuts, Massanet's Roi d'Lahore, Mascagni's Amico Frits, Wagner's Die Meistersingers and Mozart's Don Giovanni.

Die Meistersingers will, of course, have to come. It should have come before this. The dreadful scarcity of good German tenors is probably the explanation of its continued absence during the several years since the Armistice lifted the ban against German opera.