By the time Cincinnati announced its first choral festival in 1873, the city was already nationally renowned as a town of serious choral music. But the May Festival's home in the vast Saenger Hall was little more than a tin-roofed barn. During the first season, rains poured on the roof "like dried peas on a drum-head," reported the Enquirer. Patrons were drenched and umbrellas were raised inside.

After a rainstorm pelted patrons again in 1875, a horrified businessman, Reuben Springer, organized a matching grant scheme to build a new hall. Music Hall was erected for music, as well as for industrial expositions. Designed by Cincinnati's master architect Samuel Hannaford, it was a grandiose, Victorian-Gothic confection, dubbed "Sauerbraten Byzantine" by the locals.

The red-brick building is a symphony or Gothic arches, gables, nooks, towers and limestone carvings. A spectacular rose window at its peak signals it as a "cathedral of music."

On May 14, 1878, the May Festival gave its first performance there. Scalpers got $50 for tickets, and, though the hall was designed to hold 4,400, more than 6,000 people jammed inside. What a vision they beheld: The stage held 1,500 performers, and the 6,287-pipe Hook and Hastings organ, one of the five largest in the world, towered over the chorus and orchestra.

Over the years, Music Hall has hosted Billy Sunday's revival meetings, auto shows, tennis, boxing, big bands and political conventions. Visiting U.S. Presidents listed in the autograph book on display in the Green Room include Ulysses S. Grant, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.

Music Hall is now home to the May Festival, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Pops and Cincinnati Opera. Its excellent acoustics have made it an ideal place for the CSO and Pops to make their chart-topping Telarc recordings.

During the last 125 years, the hall has touched many lives - from the rich and famous to the school children that still throng annually to children's concerts.

Janelle Gelfand