Mendelssohn Glee Club

Mendelssohn Glee Club
The Mendelssohn Glee Club at the estate of Commodore Elias Cornelius Benedict in Greenwich, Connecticut, 1897
Background information
Origin	New York City, New York
Genres	Classical
Years active	1866–present
Website	http://www.mgcnyc.org/

The Mendelssohn Glee Club of New York City, founded in 1866, is the oldest surviving independent musical group in the United States after the New York Philharmonic. Their concerts, given in very high-society settings, featured the new (to American ears) four-part arrangements (tenor, second tenor, baritone and bass) that the Club founders discovered when wealthy folk began to tour Europe during the expansionist boom brought about by the Civil War. In a format that was followed by the glee clubs that sprang up in other cities, the Mendelssohn Club presented artistic works from (initially mostly German) composers, mixed with 4-part renditions of sentimental and novelty pieces, to audiences of influential friends and relatives in pleasantly informal settings. In this way, the Club created an audience for classical music among the newly well-to-do where none had existed before, leading directly to the establishment of symphony orchestras and other classical music ensembles across the country

The Club's concerts were invitation-only affairs, and in its heyday it could take up to six years for new members to be admitted. In 1890, their performance so affected Alfred Corning Clark, the millionaire owner of Singer Sewing Machines and a former member who had joined in a duet with Nell Arthur, the wife of President Chester A. Arthur, in the Club's second concert, that he immediately commissioned the construction of the six-story Mendelssohn Hall on West 40th Street, close by the early home of the Metropolitan Opera. The Hall was designed by architect and member Robert Henderson Robertson and was completed in 1892. It featured an 1100 seat auditorium, rehearsal space, apartments, and two gigantic 30-foot long murals on canvas by the artist Robert Frederick Blum in the neo-classical style that characterized the Golden Age. Among the Club's tenants was the artist Winslow Homer, who once offered to sketch the club in payment for his back rent; he was turned down. The Club was dispossessed in 1911 after Clark's widow died, and her heirs sought to make some money by leasing the building to Kinemacolor, an ambitious but premature venture into color movies.

On February 12, 1916, on the golden anniversary of the Mendelssohn Glee Club and also that of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, members and guests gathered in the auditorium of the Waldorf Astoria in New York, where the Club sang to the members and guests of the Ellis Glee Club of Los Angeles, seated with telephone receivers held fast to their ears in the Biltmore Hotel, 3,000 miles of wire away. Singing to New York in their turn, the Ellis Club completed the world's first transcontinental concert, marking the dawn of the Electronic Age as the Golden Age faded away.