Wheat- Belt Messiah

Wheat-Belt Messiah

Alma Swensson was the prim, capable wife of a Lutheran schoolman in the little Swedish-American town of Lindsborg, Kans. (pop. 2,004). Alma Swensson loved Handel's oratorio, The Messiah, decided that her Swedish neighbors should hear it too. So she sent for the music, gathered a chorus of young people from the surrounding towns and farms, rehearsed them and let the welkin ring. That was in 1882.

Mrs. Swensson's sacred musical was such a success that it went on tour, in lumber wagons along dusty Kansas roads, to the neighboring towns of Salemsburg, Salina and New Gottland. Next year they did it again. The chorus grew, acquired a permanent orchestra and conductor, hired famous soloists like Lillian Nordica, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Olive Fremstad. Lindsborg's annual Messiah became the biggest musical event in Kansas.

Last week Lindsborg's chorus sang its 168th Messiah. Visitors from as far away as Mexico swelled the little Kansas town to two-and-a-half times its normal population. Besides the Messiah the Lindsborgers sang Bach's surging, intricate St. Matthew Passion. Twice a week for many weeks, the husky, hard-handed choristers had rehearsed with religious earnestness. Some drove from farms 50 miles away. Imported soloists from the East marveled at the sober fervor with which they chanted the complicated scores.

No fashion-plate maestro guided them, but a lean, timid, white-bearded, 61-year-old Swedish music teacher named Dr. Hagbard Brase. Dr. Brase, who has brought up a strapping Swedish-American family of five on a modest salary as professor of music at Lindsborg's Bethany College, has led all of Lindsborg's Messiahs since 1915. A simple, religious man, whose hobby is gardening, Dr. Brase sleeps little spends his nights mostly poring over scores by Bach and Handel. Says he: "There will never be time enough in this world or the next to plumb the depths of the great masterpieces they have given us."

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