The growth of musical societies is a Europe-wide phenomenon, starting either in or around existing associations (churches, masonic lodges) or as private convivial gatherings. From the outset, they were also seen as a suitable platform for social pedagogics, training body and mind and instilling the values of harmonious collaboration around an edifying pursuit. As a result, collective musicianship, especially singing, also thrived in educational settings: schools and universities, and, later, in the context of workers’ organizations. As such, choirs often emerge alongside sports/athletic/gymnastic clubs, teetotalling societies, etc.

While this social-infrastructural explanation helps to identify the choirs’ social catchment and role, and explains the conditions that made their emergence possible, it does not address the more historical question of the temporal/geographical dynamics of their diffusion and activities or the cultural question as to their repertoire.

Two base types appear to have been operative: that of the French-style Orphéon, and that of the German-style Gesangverein or Liedertafel. In most individual instances, from Wales to Catalonia and from the Basque Country to the Balkans, we see a combination of local infrastructural determinants (Church structures and educational patterns; agricultural, civic or industrial aggregations) and a reticulating exchange of models and examples adopted from elsewhere and inspiring local activities – not only in the availability and choice of repertoire, but also at the level of organizational structures.  Choirs were spawned not just by the social conditions of the time, but also by each other, by following the example of other choirs, and in turn setting the example for other ones again.

The origins of the Orphéon movement are found in the Revolution period with patriotic choruses used by composers like Méhul (Chant du départ), Gossec and Louis Bocquillon (1781–1842, known mainly under his soubriquet “Wilhem”). In 1806, Bocquillon introduced choral singing as an educational method (inspired by the Lancaster method of mutual instruction). The support of Béranger allowed him to propagate it as the “Méthode Wilhem”; it was published in 1821 as Guide de la Méthode élémentaire et analytique de musique et de chant adoptée par la Société d’instruction élémentaire, ou Instruction propre à diriger le professeur ou le moniteur général de chant dans l’emploi des tableaux de la méthode.

Concert performances by school pupils followed as a matter of course. In 1833 these solidified into a Paris-based performance organization called L’Orphéon. From there, choral societies multiplied across France and the name “Orphéon” became a generic label for a society of musical amateurs. From the late 1830s onwards, local choirs would also give concerts further afield. The Chanteurs montagnards of Bagnères-de-Bigorre first scored successes in Paris, and then went on a tour including Alexandria, Istanbul and Moscow. Orphéons manifested themselves in public life on civic occasions and with festivals. A large international festival was held under the auspices of Baron Taylor in Asnières in 1850. Its “international” nature was exclusively owing to the participation of choirs from Belgium.

By the end of the 1850s, there were 700 Orphéon associations in France. Provincial festivals proliferated and concerts raised great numbers of spectators; a crowd of 50,000 assembled on the Place de l’Opéra for an open-air concert by a Spanish tuna in 1878. An Annuaire musical orphéonique de France was founded in 1875. In these years, the repertoire seems to become markedly more French and patriotic; staples were Méhul’s Chant du départ (1794) and a composition by Ambroise Thomas entitled France! France! The movement continued as a strong force of middle-class leisure-time mobilization into the 20th century and created an ambience of cultural sociability that united Paris and the provincial areas.

The name spread also south of the Pyrenees: saliently in Catalonia (thanks also to the important work by Clavè) and Galicia, but also in other parts of Spain, where by 1910 more than 20 Orphéons were active. The educational roots of the Orphéon movement meant that English pedagogues translated the Méthode Wilhem into English (1841). Although choral singing in that country had a different origin and social base (Anglican parishes and, later in the century in the industrial areas, trade unions), there was some influence of the French model when it came to the organization of festivals. 137 Orphéons, with a total of 3000 members, gave a concert in London’s Crystal Palace in 1860.

Meanwhile, in a parallel development, a no less powerful choral movement had sprung up in Germany. It emanated from two hubs: the bourgeois cultural sociability of 1808 Berlin and the Patriotic Protestantism of 1810 Zurich. In the North, the prototype was the private Liedertafel established in Berlin in 1808 by Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758–1832), friend of Goethe, musician, and instigator of the German Bach revival. Zelter’s Liedertafel was copied within Berlin, and in other Prussian and north German cities, as well as in the Prussian Rhineland. In the south, the first initiative (Zurich, 1810) by the composer and music publisher Hans-Georg Nägeli (1773–1836) found widespread dissemination. Like his French counterpart Wilhem, Nägeli was also a musical pedagogue; his educational use of music was inspired directly by Pestalozzi, for whom he published a Gesangbildungslehre nach Pestalozzischen Grundsätzen in 1810. Nägeli visited Stuttgart on a lecture tour in 1819-20, on which he canvassed the male choir as the ideal interface between popular sociability (Volksleben) and aesthetic education. The choir established in Stuttgart in response to Nägeli’s model became a prototype in its own right for similar choral societies (initially male-only) in Germany’s southern parts, replicating rapidly and widely in the 1820s-40s. As of the late 1820s the two types began to overlap (especially in Franconia and the Rhineland) and merge. Their success may in part be explained by the fact that they could draw, for their membership, on university alumni who had been introduced to convivial singing as part of the student culture of the Burschenschaften.

Locally anchored though they were, and fed by the social ambience of city life, choirs operated trans-locally and were involved in regional and transregional communicative dynamics. The foundation of regional and, ultimately, national federations, and the regular organization of mutual visits and regional festivals for a variety of choirs from different places, mirrored French developments; the difference being that while France had a single organizational centre in Paris, the reticulation in Germany was two-tiered, involving first a regional and then a federal level. An association between the choirs of Hannover and Bremen formed the nucleus of the “League of United North-German Choirs” in 1831; it attracted other local choirs and organized a series of regional festivals; these intensified in the 1830s-50s. Similar patterns were at work in Bavaria, Thuringia and Franconia; and these federations in turn entered into a nationwide meta-federative league in 1860. Pan-German festivals were regularly held from the mid-1840s onwards, and officially as Bundessängerfeste, e.g. in Nuremberg in 1860 and in Breslau/Wrocław in 1907. Thus the organizational history of these choirs in a sense offered a template of Germany’s political unification. As the choral movement became Pan-German, so did, with some delay, Germany itself.

What was also Pan-German was the repertoire. The sheet music was printed and sold across all German-speaking areas and created a culturally continuous ambience between them. As with the students’ Commersbücher (songbook anthologies), much of the repertoire was nationalistic, expressing patriotic sentiments which at the time were seen as uncontentiously inspirational and uplifting. While prominent musicians like Berlioz and Mendelssohn (a pupil of Zelter’s) put their talents in the service of the choral movement, the verbal component of the repertoire was second-rate: hackneyed occasional verse by populist versifiers like Geibel, Dahn, Chénier and the unknown author of France! France! The fact that their patriotic effusions, set to music, enjoyed considerable performative popularity creates a diffuse “hidden canon” of nationalistic literature under the radar screen of literary historians. Within Germany, the anti-French songs of the Rhine Crisis of 1840, especially Die Wacht am Rhein, were a strong presence in the repertoire, also in derivative spin-offs, prefiguring and preparing the collective singing culture that accompanied the mobilizations of 1870 and 1914.

The choral movement affected the French-German border zone from two directions. One Gent choir, the Mélomanes, was founded in 1838 on the model of the French Orphéon (and participated in the Asnières festival), the other, the Lion de Flandre, founded in 1843, found its inspiration in the Rhineland (as did the Antwerp choir De Scheldezonen of 1844). Dutch choirs were wholly a spill-over from the Rhineland. Cross-border choral festivals were held in the border town of Kleve with a pronounced Dutch participation (from Amsterdam and nearby Nijmegen and Arnhem). These festivals were seen on the Dutch side as international fraternization, and among German patriots as a reconnection between Dutch and deutsch. Such contacts dwindled after 1848 as the German movement, in the 1850s, grew increasingly militant in its national chauvinism and began to inspire unease in the Netherlands.

In the ethnically mixed territories of Central Europe, especially in the Baltic area, cities with a strong German presence had their choral societies as a matter of course: Königsberg, Breslau/Wroclaw, Budapest. In Prague, a Liedertafel der deutschen Studenten was established at the Charles University in 1844. All these sparked off competitive imitations from Hungarian and Slavic co-inhabitants of those cities. The most extraordinary repercussions took place in the Baltic area. Although the Baltic provinces had all come under Russian rule, city life in Riga, Reval/Tallinn and Dorpat/Tartu was still dominated by German townspeople, their culture and sociability. In 1851, German-style choirs (possibly inspired by the one in Königsberg) were founded in these three cities. The model of cultural-performative conviviality and the “embodied community” proved ideally suited to the vernacular culture of the Estonian and Latvian populations, amongst whom consciousness-raising and nation-building processes were just beginning to emerge at that time. A first all-Estonian song festival was held in Tartu in 1869 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of peasant emancipation in Livland, with 845 singers and an audience of 10,000-15,000. The movement gathered in strength with further festivals held in 1879, 1880, 1891, 1894 and 1896; and from 1873 the cue was taken up by Latvians as well. The Baltic Germans had delivered the inspiration, the organizational design and the community-bonding and nation-mobilizing function; the native populations fitted these made-in-Germany vehicles with their own ethnic (Estonian, Latvian, also Lithuanian) payload.

Rooted in municipal city culture and active locally, but ramifying far and wide through processes of cultural communication and institutional contagion, the voice of the choral movement carried far and wide. It proved an ideal means to generate local mobilization for national ideals, and thus offers an almost ideal-typical example of the interaction between the social and the cultural, the local and the transnational, in the history of nationalism in Europe.