Music: Cincinnati’s Festival

Cincinnati is a musical city. It owes its music to the influx of German refugees (after Germany’s revolution of 1848) whom the yellow Ohio River reminded of the Rhine. With them to Cincinnati they brought Moselle and Riesling wine grapes, which they planted in the surrounding hills, and traditional German love of music. The grapes did not turn out well, but the love of music soon began to bear.

In 1873 Cincinnati’s German-American burghers decided to have a big music festival. They got together the small singing societies in Cincinnati and nearby cities, invited famed Conductor Theodore Thomas to bring his own orchestra. The festival was such a rip-roaring success that it became the talk of every small town in the Midwest. Five years later, Cincinnatians decided that their festival needed a permanent home. So at a cost of $310,000 they built themselves what was then the largest and finest concert auditorium in the U. S. Today Cincinnati’s enormous, ancient, many-spired Music Hall still stands. The paint on its walls has chipped off and its roof leaks, but it is one of the half-dozen acoustically perfect large auditoriums in the U. S. There, every two years, Cincinnati still gathers its huge Festival Chorus and its Cincinnati Symphony, puts on its big musical event, the Cincinnati May Music Festival.

Last week Cincinnati held its 33rd festival. For nearly two years, three nights a week, the Festival Chorus had rehearsed the choral numbers that were to be its main attraction. The chorus’ 400 earnest adult members included debutantes, cooks, physicians. chauffeurs, lawyers, knife grinders. All had attended rehearsals with religious regularity, knowing that sharp-nosed Festival Conductor Eugene Goossens would promptly bounce any half-hearted singer from the ranks.

When the five-day festival opened, even ramshackle Music Hall had had a coat of paint, and the smell of moth balls rose from Cincinnati’s resurrected tail coats like incense in a cathedral.

For their program the Cincinnatians had chosen a massive musical barbecue that only the stoutest and most experienced musical stomachs could digest. Most notable piece de resistance was the huge 8th Symphony of Gustav Mahler, for full chorus, boys’ choir, a 102-man symphony orchestra and a choir of brass instruments off stage. One of the most impressive of 20th-century symphonic works, Mahler’s immense, unwieldy, hour-and-a-half-long symphony is seldom performed. When Leopold Stokowski played it in Philadelphia 23 years’ ago, proud Philadelphians crowed as though they had hatched a world’s series baseball team. But Cincinnatians just took it in their stride, put it on the same program with another hour-long choral epic, sat calmly through them both, then thundered their approval.

Two important and meaty modern works for chorus and orchestra were given first U. S. hearings. The first was a smoldering, wrath-&-judgment Old-Testament oratorio, Watchman, What of the Night? by James Gutheim Heller, rabbi of Cincinnati’s aged Plum Street Temple. A chorus of 600 children helped Soprano Helen Jepson sing the second: a complicated Magnificat by German-born Hermann Hans Wetzler, who once played the organ in Manhattan’s Trinity Church.

Salad and dessert were still to come. With Kirsten Flagstad, Marjorie Lawrence, Kerstin Thorborg, Eyvind Laholm and a galaxy of other top-flight singers, Conductor Goossens and his Cincinnati Symphony dished out the whole of Saint-Saens’ opera, Samson et Dalila, and Act II of Wagner’s Parsifal, threw in Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms and a brace of 18th-Century oratorios, and filled in the chinks with miscellaneous nuts and raisins of symphonic, operatic and choral music.

This mighty musical meal over, Cincinnatians stretched, patted their stomachs, paid the bill ($72,000—of which $63,000 had been recovered at the box office) and started to plan for the festival of 1941. Visitors to the May Festival went thoughtfully away, realizing that the nearest thing yet to the muchdiscussed, hypothetical “Salzburg of the U. S.” is to be found in Cincinnati.