Page:Romain Rolland Handel.djvu/149

Rh Bach's model for his St. Matthew Passion. At the end of Israel in Egypt, after those great choral mountains of sounds, by an ingenious contrast a female voice is heard alone without accompaniment, and then a hymn alternating with the chorus which repeats it. It is the same again at the end of the little short Ode to St. Cecilia.

In the Occasional Oratorio a duet for Soprano and Alto alternates with the choruses, but it is in Judas Maccabæus where he best achieves this combination of solos and the chorus. In this victorious epic of an invaded people, who rose up and overcame their oppressors, the individualities are scarcely distinguished from the heroic soul of the nation, and the chiefs of the people are only the choralists, whose songs set dancing the enormous ensembles which unfold themselves in powerful and irresistible progressions, like a giant's procession up a triumphal staircase.

It follows then that when the orchestra is added to the dialogue of solos and of choruses, the third element enters into the psychological drama, sometimes in apparent opposition to the two others. Thus in the second act of Judas Maccabæus the orchestra which sounds the battle calls makes a vivid contrast to the somewhat funereal choruses on which they are interposed: We hear the pleasing dreadful call, or to put it better, they complete them, and fill in the picture. After Death—Glory.

The oratorio being a "free theatre," it becomes necessary for the music to supply the place of the scenery. Thus its picturesque and descriptive rôle