The account that has been given of the development of Protestant Church music, and organ and clavier music, previous to Handel and Bach, may serve to show the foundations on which their monumental works were built. It was Handel’s mission to reconcile the church and secular styles in his great oratorios. His long career as a dramatic composer served as an admirable school for his talents; and when in middle life he abandoned the field of Italian opera for the oratorio, he was so well equipped that his triumphs were but as the natural result of his former discipline. His forty operas shared the fate of all operas of that time; not one holds a place on the modern stage. The operas of Handel are not musical dramas in the sense of the present day. They consist chiefly of a string of airs, with little or no dramatic action. His stage heroes are generally trivial and insipid. It was destined for Gluck and Mozart to reform the traditional Italian opera. Handel was content to avail himself of the conditions of the opera as they then existed. His opera airs are the best of his time; they are lyric, but not dramatic. The dramatic talent of Handel did not find expression in his operas but in his oratorios. The great heroes of Jewish history, like Samson, Saul and Judas Maccabæus, are represented in a combined narrative and dramatic form. Many of his oratorio solos are more dramatic than his opera airs. In the oratorio of “Samson,” for instance, the characters of Samson, Delila, Minoah and Micah naturally suggest the dramatic scene. But it is especially in the conflicting ideas and emotions of the people—the chorus of Israelites, in opposition to the chorus of Philistines, the heathen priests of Dagon, and the chorus of Virgins of Delila—that the dramatic conflict is sharply defined with sublime choral effects. His choruses are elemental in their irresistible and overwhelming power when sung by large masses of voices. In this respect his choruses are unique and have never been equalled. While Handel’s oratorios in general hold the middle ground between the secular and church style of his time, Bach’s great choral works belong more distinctly to the older church style of Schütz and others.