But what belongs chiefly to him--not that he invented it, but made the happiest use of it--is the musical architecture of solo and chorus alternating and intermingled. Purcell and the French composers had given him this idea. He attempted it in his earliest religious works, especially in his _Birthday Ode for Queen Anne_, 1713, where nearly every solo air is taken up again by the following chorus.[341] He had a great feeling for light and pleased himself by introducing in the middle of his choral masses, solo songs which soared up into the air like birds.[342] His dramatic genius knew, when required, how to draw from this combination the most astounding effects. Thus in the _Passion after Brockes_, 1716, where the dialogue of the Daughter of Sion and the chorus _Eilt ihr angefochten Seelen_, with its questions, its responses, its Æschylian interjections, served as 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.