One of the most important of the French romantic oratorios is Hector Berlioz’s sacred trilogy, _L’enfance du Christ_ (‘The Childhood of Christ’), which was written in 1854 and performed in Paris and Brussels the same year. This oratorio, dealing with the flight of the Holy Family, is really an enlargement of an earlier cantata, _Fuite en Egypt_ (‘The Flight into Egypt’), and shows traces of the influence of Lesueur, whose pupil, Berlioz, caught the operatic spirit that was associated with his master’s work. The oratorio, the text of which is by the composer, consists of three rather short parts--The Dream of Herod, The Flight into Egypt and The Arrival in Sais. The first part depicts Herod, tormented by awful dreams and influenced by the soothsayers to kill the first-born men-children. The music is sombre, but in the Herod passages takes on the operatic style referred to above. In strong contrast to this is the second part, which deals entirely with the Holy Family and reveals qualities of loveliness and naïveté as it depicts the babe Jesus greeted by the chorus of angels. The most elaborate part is the third, especially the portion which reveals Joseph demanding shelter where he has been refused. Here the music assumes a dramatic and brilliant development. Although Charles Gounod (1818-93) after the extraordinary success of his masterpiece, ‘Faust,’ was firmly established as one of the foremost opera-composers of Europe, he never lost touch with religious music and finally abandoned the stage entirely for the style that lay closest to his real ambition, becoming the greatest, if not indeed the only great, composer of oratorio in France during this period. As a winner of the _Grand Prix de Rome_ he had studied ecclesiastical music, especially the works of Palestrina; during a visit to Vienna in 1842 he had produced a Requiem in the church of St. Charles, which created a profound impression, and soon after returning to Paris he had even seriously thought of taking holy orders. Wide attention was first attracted to him by the London performance of portions of his _Messe solennelle_, and even during the period of his greatest fame from his stage-works, he constantly reverted to the composition of sacred music. His two great oratorios--‘The Redemption’ and _Mors et Vita_--strike out a somewhat new path for this art-form. Here he abandons entirely the contrapuntal and fugal character of the chorus as being artificial and unessential, thus departing completely from Handelian and Mendelssohnian models, and adopts from the Wagnerian music-drama the system of ‘leading motives,’ of which he makes limited use to designate important and representative religious or dramatic themes. Both of these oratorios were composed for English audiences, and Gounod’s residence in London after the Franco-Prussian War and his acquaintance with the English festival oratorio undoubtedly colored the compositions