Cincinnati May Festival

The Cincinnati May Festival is a two-week annual choral festival, held in May in Cincinnati, Ohio, US.

The festival's roots go back to the 1840s, when Saengerfests were held in that city, bringing singers from all over the United States and abroad to perform large scale classical works of the day.

In A City That Sings, we find a description of Cincinnati in the late 1800s: "In the final decades of the nineteenth century Cincinnati cemented its position as one of America's cultural leaders with the founding of the still flourishing May Festival (1873), the Cincinnati Art Museum (1886) and its neighbor in Cincinnati, the Cincinnati Art Academy (1887), and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (1895).

Singing societies were very popular in the nineteenth century and the tradition was no different in Cincinnati. Both the English and German societies were evident. As a rule, the differences between the two national choral traditions were in language, origin, composition, and social scope. English societies, the earliest of Cincinnati's choral ensembles, existed primarily to make music. The first German society was founded in 1825, but the majority of these organizations arose after an immigration boom in the late 1840s. They provided social opportunities for eating and drinking, as well as making music. Most of the German societies were men's choruses, but women were sometimes admitted, often as non-singing supporting members, in the last half of the century.

In October 1863, a circular was sent to the 'Musical Public of Cincinnati' to extend a 'cordial invitation to singers, both ladies and gentlemen, who will take an interest in building up a large Choral Society, such as the old societies of Boston and New York, to join.' This mixed chorus approach to presenting oratorio with members drawn from a broad spectrum of Cincinnati's singers regardless of the nationality or society to which they pledged allegiance, must be regarded as an important precedent of the May Festival.

Maria Longworth Nichols Storer the granddaughter of Nicholas Longworth, a banker and winemaker, and wife of Colonel George Ward Nichols took a trip to England in 1871. There she witnessed one of the large English festivals. At home, Mr. Nichols was a member of the Harmonic Society, so the couple was involved in choral music of the English variety. Mrs. Nichols knew Cincinnati's choral tradition was the perfect place to start a musical festival of their own. She wrote to Theodore Thomas, a renowned American, conductor and asked for a meeting with him on his next visit to Cincinnati.

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Wikipedia