II - HANDEL

Summary

After Palestrina the world had to wait nearly a hundred years for another great composer of the highest rank. In reality the time that passed before works of anything like as great calibre as his were produced again was considerably over a whole century, but to count from the year of his death to the year when Handel and Bach were born is actually ninety-one years. This certainly seems a very long while, and it seems the more remarkable if it is compared with the ninety-one years immediately before the present day. In that time some of Haydn's best symphonies have been written, and his Creation and his Seasons, all Beethoven's symphonies and masses, and his opera Fidelio, and Weber's Freischiitz, and Schubert's songs, Mendelssohn's oratorios, and Chopin's pianoforte music, and Schumann's many beautiful productions, and all Wagner's immense music dramas; and if the time is expanded just to a century it will take in all the greatest of Mozart's symphonies and his Requiem as well; so it seems to hold almost all that is most interesting in thoroughly modern music. And in the same amount of time, from Palestrina's death onwards, the world was, musically speaking, almost dumb. But it is not really so strange as it looks on the surface; for in that hundred years there was an enormous amount of work to be done before men could climb to the top of the next mountain-quite enough to have taken a hundred years, and more, if composers and musicians had not worked very hard.