=Oratorio in Germany=.—In Oratorio as in Opera, the style spread to other countries, there, in the case of the Oratorio, ultimately to find a more congenial home; for the Oratorio, in Italy after the time of Stradella, seemed to lose hold on composers and public. The latter did not grasp the fact that the Oratorio had within it one element, the chorus, to give to it a definite individuality. They submitted to the public’s preference for solo singing and made up their oratorios largely of conventional arias—thus inviting comparison with the Opera, and reserved their writing in choral form for their works for the Church service, such as psalms, magnificats, masses and motets. In Germany, the attitude of the people toward religious music, doubtless owing to the Reformation as well as to the serious nature of the people, was much more favorable than in Italy. This temperament is shown by the fact that when German composers cast about for themes for their oratorios they seemed to choose the story of the Passion. The oldest example of the German Oratorio is “The Resurrection of Christ,” written by =Heinrich Schuetz= (1585-1672), a pupil of Giovanni Gabrieli, which was produced at Dresden in 1623. The narrative portions were committed almost entirely to the chorus. We mention also a setting of the Passion, by =Johann Sebastiani=, published in 1672, which contains interspersed chorales, sung as arias by one voice with violin accompaniment, and by =Reinhard Keiser= (1674-1739). =Use of the Chorale=.—A step in advance was taken when German composers began to use the chorale of the German Protestant Church as the subject for contrapuntal elaboration, a tendency shown in the work of Sebastiani referred to in the preceding paragraph. The Chorale had absorbed into itself the spirit of the Volkslied, and its use supplied the medium for the public to enter fully into the spirit of the oratorio. Two composers who developed the “Passion Music” idea to its height, =Karl Heinrich Graun= (1701-1759) and =Johann Sebastian Bach=, made the Chorale an integral part of their works. The greatest work in oratorio form written by Graun was called _Der Tod Jesu_ (The Death of Jesus), which was first produced in the Cathedral at Berlin in 1755. This work consists of recitatives, airs and choruses, the fugal treatment of the latter being admirable in point of clearness of design and breadth of form. Graun used in this oratorio six chorales. _Der Tod Jesu_, owing to a bequest, is still given in Berlin.