The B Minor Mass and its First Performance in China

8 November 2024

Prof. Urrows writes:

Any performance of a work of the size and importance of JS Bach’s B Minor Mass is an undertaking of such magnitude, that one would think it impossible to hide. Nevertheless, clarification is needed to settle the matter of the first performance of this work in China, since it has been the subject of misdirection, and in some cases outright untruth.

To set the record straight: the first and earliest performance known of this great masterpiece in China in fact took place in Shanghai on Saturday, 2 June 1934. The choir was the Shanghai Choral Society in its debut performance (but see below), and the orchestra the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra[1], both apparently augmented with additional members from the musical public brought in for this special occasion. The conductor was, naturally, Mario Paci (1878-1946), long-time resident of Shanghai and conductor of the SMO. The instrumental soloists for the Bach included concertmaster and assistant conductor, Arrigo Foa (1900-81), the principal oboe, F. Felciani, who had managed to find an oboe d’amore, and principal horn, W. Schroeter, who sat through the whole work for his brief solo in the Quoniam.

In fact, the dress rehearsal on Friday 1 June was open and attended by a large crowd made up for the most part of schoolchildren, who were charged a concessionary sum of 20 cents. Thus, in a sense the first public hearing of this performance took place on that day. This was reported, slightly inaccurately, in the North China Morning Post on 2 June (see Fig. 1).

Ticketing and other arrangements were handled by the Moutrie firm, the leading music store in Shanghai at the time, who also printed a souvenir program with the text of the Mass in seven languages, reflecting the very diverse choir, orchestra, and audience who both performed and heard the work. Both the orchestra and the choir were fully integrated with Chinese and non-Chinese members at this time.

The soloists, evidently chosen by Paci, were, surprisingly, all Russian refugees. The weekend previous to the concert, the Shanghai Sunday Times ran an illustrated notice with their photos (see Fig. 2). Among these, the outstanding figure was the bass, Vladimir Grigorievich Shushlin (1896-1978), known in Chinese by the name, Su Shilin (苏石林). Shushlin taught at the Shanghai Conservatory from 1930 to 1956, and is still regarded as the ‘founder of Chinese vocal singing’, at least of a Western and operatic type. The other singers were probably members of the highly-successful, local Russian Light Opera Company.

Yes, it was a motely crew of soloists, choral singers, and musicians, numbering according to the press ca. 250 in total. This was a late example of 19^th C. ‘monster Baroque’, which even by the 1930s was starting to fade from favor.  But it was undoubtedly for this reason that the performance was given not in the orchestra’s usual home, the Lyceum Theatre, or another concert venue, but at the Drill Hall of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps on Foochow Road. The Hall had been built in 1914, and no other indoor site in Shanghai at the time could have accommodated the nearly 2000 performers and audience members expected.

Despite all this, the concert lost money. In the following season the Shanghai Choral Society (see Fig. 3) presented two somewhat-more popular works to help pay down their part of the debt, Handel’s Israel in Egypt (conducted by Russian-Jewish refugee conductor/composer Aaron Avshalomoff, 1894-1965), and Mendelssohn’s Elijah, conducted by W. J. Dexter, organist at the Anglican Holy Trinity Cathedral and Secretary of the SCS. The last concert notices in the Shanghai press for the SCS date to 1940.

However, it is possible that this was the second incarnation of the Choral Society, since an earlier ‘Shanghai Choral Society’ had started around 1884, and continued until about 1909. Was the 1934-40 SCS a new organization, or was it a revival of the old Society? That is a question which requires further research.

What does not need any further research is the utterly false notion, circulated for the past 25 years on the web and other places, that the ‘first’ performance of the B Minor Mass in China was only given in Beijing in 1999 by the China National Symphony Orchestra and Central Conservatory Chorus, conducted by the late University of Michigan faculty member, Thomas Hilbish (1918-2015). This erroneous claim can be found on numerous websites, including the Bach Cantatas Website (https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Bio/Hilbish-Thomas.htm), various obituaries, personal webpages/websites of people who were involved in the 1999 performance, and some University of Michigan webpages (I am quite sure this is because they are simply not in possession of the facts.)

Why this fake news started is difficult to understand, since the Shanghai performance 65 years earlier was definitely a ‘public’ performance, and widely reported in the press of the day. It may have had something to do with the endless rivalry between Beijing and Shanghai, some hypersensitivity to the obvious religious nature of the work, or some aspect of official narrative control. At any rate, it is high time to set the record straight. 

 

 

[1] Properly, the Shanghai Municipal Council Symphony Orchestra, which was supported by local taxpayers.