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The Cincinnati May Festival is a two-week annual choral festival, held in May in Cincinnati, Ohio, US. ==History== 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. He recounts: 'On my…visit in 1871 (was 1872 ) a young married lady, member of one of the leading families, laid before me a plan for a large Musical Festival. She proposed that I should be the conductor of it, saying that I would be responsible for the artistic side, she would find the men who would take charge of the business details. I soon found out that this lady was not only very talented in may ways, but that her taste was not amateurish in anything, and I readily consented to undertake the work she wished me to do.'〔 He agreed to be conductor of the Festival if fifty thousand dollars could be raised for a guarantee fund and a committee could be formed to take care of the business aspects of the event.〔 Mrs. Nichols's biographer, Sr. Rose Angela Boehle, mentions that Maria and Col. Nichols started the guarantee fund of the 1873 Festival with a five-thousand-dollar contribution. Among the first actions of the Executive Committee was the hiring of Theordore Thomas as musical director and Carl Barus as director of the chorus. Thomas's touring orchestra would play, as they would continue to do at every festival until 1904. Arthur Mees, a Cincinnati music teacher, was named rehearsal accompanist and later, festival organist. While the artistic forces were almost entirely German, the administrative team that planned the event was mostly of English descent. A circular describing the expectations of chorus members was printed in English and German and distributed to 121 music dealers, 60 post offices, and 144 singing societies. It was also distributed to 1,120 newspapers throughout Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and 'the leading papers of the West.'〔 According to the superintendent of the chorus, Samuel D. Carey, by the time the first performance took place, the chorus had 706 members. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Cincinnati May Festival」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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