Although people of all classes participated in and attended professional and amateur large-scale choral performances in 19th-century England, no comprehensive study of these multiple choral activities has been written as yet. Musical life was abundant: choral societies, brass bands, orchestras and travelling opera companies were commonplace. Grand oratorio performances provided an aural and visual demonstration of national belonging, community and identity. Choirs had been included in state and civic occasions since the 1730s. The hunger for performances of oratorio by large choruses can be traced from the Handel Commemoration (1784) onwards. Handel’s Messiah was a bedrock of the repertoire, accessible and appropriate for amateur performance, associated with charitable causes and uniting people of disparate backgrounds within a shared moral and religious framework. The Sacred Harmonic Society’s three-day Handel Festival of 1857 involved 1200 singers from London and 800 from the provinces, and was attended by audiences totalling 48,474. The subsequent Handel Centenary (1859) at the Crystal Palace was vast in its proportions and spawned the Handel Festival Chorus with its amateur divisions around the country. This Crystal Palace Festival was held on a triennial basis (with the exception of the bicentennial anniversary of Handel’s birth in 1885) until 1926. Handel’s popularity and status in the choral life of the nation remained undiminished.

The scale and impact of choral-orchestral activity is clear from studies of music festivals and events across the period, institutional histories of organizations such as the Bach Choir and Huddersfield Choral Society, and the transformational agency of the Tonic Sol-Fa method developed by Sarah Glover (1785–1867) and, following her, by the congregational minister John Curwen (1816–1880). Choirs could belong to the social elite (e.g. Bradford’s Liedertafel, based, as the name suggests, on a German model), or were drawn from industrial clubs, or formed to serve the music festivals in centres including Birmingham, Leeds, Norwich and Bradford. The infrastructures that produced such large numbers of musically educated people able to contribute usefully to a chorus were gradually embedded in the routines and expectations of work, faith, education and purposeful leisure and self-improvement. With the advance of industrialization and urbanization came a greater cosmopolitanism. Various influences were at play in helping to improve musical literacy. The rise of Methodism and evangelical faiths led to an increased involvement in hymn-singing within these denominations. The publication of hymnbooks and associated music theory and Sol-Fa material was incorporated into the extensive activities of Sunday schools and mechanics institutes. Educationalists and social reformers led what was described as a “mania” for choral sight-singing. This widening of access to printed music originated in London in 1841 with the pioneering work of both Joseph Mainzer (1801–1851; Singing for the million) and John Hullah (1812–1884; Wilhem’s method of teaching singing). Glover’s and Curwen’s Tonic Sol-Fa method (Singing for Schools and Congregations, 1843) and the Tonic Sol-Fa College, which opened in 1879, served to instil choral singing among the lower and middle classes.

Oratorio rather than opera was the dominant feature in English musical life. Festivals commissioned choral works such as the lastingly popular Elijah by Mendelssohn (Birmingham, 1846), Sullivan’s The golden legend (Leeds, 1886) and Elgar’s The dream of Gerontius (Birmingham, 1900). Improvements in the economies of music publishing allowed the pioneering Novello Company to disseminate cheap copies of sacred works in a clear and accessible format. This deeply embedded oratorio culture, founded on Handel’s Messiah, was a source of pride, community and nationwide involvement.