Handel and Haydn Society
| Handel and Haydn Society | |
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| Background information | |
| Genres | American chorus and period instrument orchestra |
| Years active | 1815–Present |
| Website | www |
The Handel and Haydn Society, familiarly known as H+H, is an American chorus and period instrument orchestra based in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1815, it is the third oldest musical organization in the United States after the Stoughton Musical Society (founded in 1786) and the U.S. Marine Band (founded 1798), and the oldest continually performing arts organization in the United States.
The Handel and Haydn Society was founded as an oratorio society in Boston on March 24, 1815, by a group of Boston merchants and musicians, "to promote the love of good music and a better performance of it". The founders, Gottlieb Graupner, Thomas Smith Webb, Amasa Winchester, and Matthew S. Parker, described their aims as "cultivating and improving a correct taste in the performance of Sacred Music, and also to introduce into more general practice, the works of Handel, Haydn, and other eminent composers." The Society premiered on Christmas Day, December 25, 1815, at King's Chapel (then Stone Chapel), with a chorus of 90 men and 10 women. The early chorus members were middle-class tradesmen drawn from the choirs of local churches. Only men could be members, while a far smaller number of women were invited to participate. In its early decades the Society hired what musicians it could afford and used unpaid amateurs to complete the orchestra or sometimes substituted organ for orchestra.
Jonas Chickering, at the start of his career as a piano manufacturer, joined the Society in 1818 at age 20 and later became its president. The Society was also an early promoter of composer Lowell Mason, publishing his first collection of hymns in 1822 and later electing him as the group's President. Profits from the sales of that hymnbook and a second collection of sacred music subsidized the Society for several decades.
The Handel and Haydn Society has given a number of notable American premieres, including Handel's Messiah in 1818, and Haydn's The Creation in 1819. The Society also sponsored the first American publication of an edition of Messiah in 1816. It presented the U.S. premieres of musical settings by many baroque and classical composers, including Mozart and Bach. An 1818 assessment in the New England Palladium magazine said:
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