in rendering him homage. Goethe admired him, and Herder devoted a chapter to him in his Adrastea of 1802. The wars of Independence gave an access of favour to the oratorio of freedom, to Judas Maccabæus.
With romanticism the feeling for the genius of Handel was lost. Berlioz, who, if he had but known him truly, and had found a model for that grand popular style which he sought, never understood him. Of all other musicians, those who approached to the spirit of Handel nearest were Schumann and Liszt,[1] but they were exceptional in the lucidity of their perception, and their generous sympathies. It might be said that Handel's art, distorted by the editions and false renderings quite as much those in Germany as the ridiculously colossal representations in England would have been completely lost except for the foundation in 1856 of the Handel Society, which devoted itself to the object of publishing an exact and complete edition of the
- ↑ Schumann wrote to Pohl in 1855, that Israel in Egypt was his "ideal of a choral work" and, wishing to write a work called Luther, he defined this music thus, of which he found the ideal realized by Handel: "A popular oratorio that both country and town-people can understand. ... A work of simple inspiration, in which the effect depends entirely on the melody and the rhythm, without contrapuntal artifice."
Liszt, apropos of the Anthem Zadock the Priest, goes into ecstasies over "the genius of Handel, great as the world itself," and very rightly perceives in the author of the Allegro and of Israel, a precursor of descriptive music.
