Another lofty, yet wholly different personality, born also in 1685, is found in Johann Sebastian Bach, whose Passion Oratorios, a direct outgrowth of the Passion plays of old, furnish materials and inspiration for all time.  Handel worked in and for the public and fought his battles in the great world.  Bach was the lonely scholar who lived apart from outside turmoil and unabashed in the presence of earthly monarchs, reigned supreme in the tone-world.  A typical Teuton, his music, intensely earnest, highly intellectual, contains the essence of Teutonism, and gives full, rich, copious expression to the inmost being of humanity.  The spirit of Protestant Germany is embodied in his religious tone productions which have proved to Protestantism a tower of strength.  His service in developing the choral alone is inestimable.  Nothing that he has written, better represents the majesty and sublimity of his style than his “Saint Matthew Passion” with its surpassing utterances of human sorrow and infinite tenderness.

In the year 1790, when Joseph Haydn had accepted an invitation to make a professional visit to London, his young friend, Mozart, endeavored to dissuade him from going on account of his age, but Haydn persisted, declaring that he was still active and strong.  Eight years later, at sixty-six years of age, he wrote his celebrated oratorio “The Creation,” with all the vigor and sparkle of youth.  The rambles of years in the beautiful grounds of Esterhazy had attuned his soul to communion with nature, and this work plainly shows his power of putting into tones the secrets nature revealed to him.  Blissful joyousness and child-like naivete are among its characteristic features.

The style of Beethoven as a composer of sacred music is reflected in his single oratorio “Christ on the Mount of Olives,” that like his single opera stands apart, amply sufficient to prove what he was capable of accomplishing.  Mendelssohn, in his “St. Paul” and his “Elijah,” embodied a high ideal, building on his predecessors and attaining, especially in the latter, an eclectic spirit that manifests keen discrimination.  The oratorios of Liszt, the “Christus,” “St. Elizabeth” and some lesser works, reveal high purpose and original treatment of a revelation in tones of sacred events.  In the oratorios of the Frenchman Gounod, preeminently in his “Redemption,” it is interesting to find modern chorals based on those of the German Bach, and, in fact, as it has been aptly said, a modernized treatment of Bach’s passion form.

What may be the next step in the evolution of the oratorio it were difficult to estimate.  Whether modern efforts can ever surpass, or even equal, the sublime productions in this field, or whether creative genius will be turned into wholly new channels, the future alone may determine.

[Illustration:  Saint-Saens]

XII

Symphony and Symphonic Poem