Word: ngerknaben
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Boys. When a special bus bumped into Ripon, Wis. one afternoon last week, 20 world-famous little boys got out of it. Though they had traveled 300 wet, slippery miles from South Bend, Ind., the Wiener Sängerknaben (Singing Boys of Vienna) were erect and lively as they marched into their hotel. There they stripped to the waist, scrubbed their faces, brushed their teeth, composed themselves for a short nap. That night they made the little college town gasp at their sweet voices and expert phrasing. Students, teachers and farmers from 100 miles around listened reverently to da Vittoria...
...Singing Boys date back to 1498 when Emperor Maximilian I founded a choir to supply music for his chapel. After his death other Habsburgs subsidized the choir. It became one of the foremost groups in Europe. Haydn and Schubert were sängerknaben until their voices changed. The Habsburgs would not have their boy sopranos castrated, though this practice was common enough in 17th and 18th-Century Europe...
With 21 other Wiener Sängerknaben (Singing Boys of Vienna), small Wilhelm Herp, 12, was riding along in a special Pullman car between Three Rivers and Quebec one day last month, rehearsing for the next concert. Suddenly, to the dismay of Wilhelm Herp & friends but as it must to most young males, adolescence came to Wilhelm Herp. In the midst of a note his clear young alto voice sharply, ludicrously "broke." Obviously he could sing no more on the Wiener Sängerknaben 's U. S. tour (TIME, Nov. 14). There were 30-odd concerts still to come...
Mozart was never one of the Wiener Sängerknaben but Haydn and Schubert had their first musical training in the choir school as did Clemens Krauss, natural son of an Archduke and a ballet dancer, who now directs the Vienna Opera. Haydn and Schubert had to leave the choir when their voices broke. The Habsburgs would not have their boy sopranos castrated although that was common practice elsewhere in 17th and 18th Century Europe. With the fall of the Habsburgs the choir disbanded, but six years later Father Josef Schnitt, a priest at the Former Imperial Chapel, reorganized...
Most boy choirs existed because the Catholic Church would not permit women to sing in the sanctuary. The Wiener Sängerknaben sang nothing but ecclesiastical music until 1926 when Father Schnitt's savings were gone and they went out giving concerts with an eye to the boxoffice. The blue-&-white sailor costumes which the boys are wearing for the U. S. concerts are symbolic of the secular turn their programs have taken. (In Washington last week they sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "Dixie.") Proceeds from their U. S. tour, to be taken in a bus labeled "Wiener...