Historian’s book charts 200 years of the Halifax Choral Society

ESTABLISHED for more than 200 years, Halifax Choral Society has made musical and social history, not least for its unbroken annual tradition of performing Handel’s Messiah.  Now, the story of “the most enduring amateur choral society in the western world” has been told in full by a leading Huddersfield historian. 

Dr John Hargreaves – a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield – is the author of the standard history of Halifax and its surrounding district.  In his latest book, he focusses on the town’s Choral Society and the musical culture that created and sustained “one of the very longest, continuously performing arts organisations in Calderdale, or Yorkshire or indeed anywhere else in the United Kingdom”.

Titled Every Valley Shall Be Exalted: A history of the Halifax Choral Society 1818-2018 – taken from an air in Messiah – Dr Hargreaves’s book culminates in the Choral Society’s bi-centenary celebrations in 2018, and its plans for a 200th performance of Handel’s most famous oratorio.

“Nowhere else in the United Kingdom has emulated this unbroken record of 200 successive annual Messiah performances including 200 Hallelujah Choruses in two centuries, supremely linking Halifax with this iconic, quintessential, choral music.”

The author delves deeply into the origins of the society, which was a product of a musical culture that was already well-established by 1818.  In 1788, the leading composer Charles Dibdin visited Halifax for a concert and described it as “the most musical spot for its size in the country”.

One of the men responsible for this reputation was Joah Bates, who was brought up in Halifax and trained singers at its Parish Church for a 1766 performance of Messiah – a key episode in “Halifax’s Georgian musical renaissance”.  In 1784, Bates – by then a prominent national figure – conducted a famous Handel Commemoration in London that had at least 525 performers, including several recruited from Halifax and the Calder Valley.

The prime movers in the formation in 1818 of the Halifax Quarterly Choral Society – as it was first known – were a group of affluent men headed by the wealthy merchant William Priestley.  But if the local elite led the way, the musical culture of Halifax and district provided plentiful opportunities and routes to success for men and women from humbler backgrounds.

One was a former textile worker named Daniel Sugden, who taught the flute to William Priestley’s neighbour Anne Lister – the chatelaine of Shibden Hall who is now famous as the title character in the BBC series Gentleman Jack.

Dr Hargreaves also describes the careers of other men and women with modest origins who rose to musical eminence in the 1800s, in particular the Brighouse-born singer Mrs Susan Sunderland.  She was a leading soprano soloist with the Halifax Choral Society who “more than any other, popularised the oratorio not only in her native Calder Valley, but amongst all classes across the social spectrum throughout Yorkshire and beyond, ranging from British and foreign royalty in the metropolis to fellow weavers and other industrial workers in the factory and mining districts of the industrial north”.

William Priestley was an avid collector of musical scores, and Dr Hargreaves tells how he acquired from the Continent a rare edition of Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabaeus with embellishments by Mozart.  This was rediscovered in the archives of the Halifax Choral Society by former University of Huddersfield musicologist Rachel Cowgill.  In 2002, it was performed again, generating immense interest from the musical world and the media.

Between his detailed description of the origins of the Choral Society and its continued success in the 20th and 21st centuries, Dr Hargreaves also describes the Society’s “efflorescence” during the Victorian and Edwardian period, attributing this to William Priestley’s vision of extending the choir’s repertoire and to its appeal across a wide social spectrum.