[279] The first was the Singakademie of Berlin, founded in 1790 by Fasch.
[280] In the Harmonicon of January, 1824, one finds Beethoven’s opinion (quoted by Percy Robinson): “Handel is the greatest composer who has ever lived. I should like to kneel at his tomb.” And in a letter from Beethoven to an English lady (published in the Harmonicon of December, 1825): “I adore Handel.” We know that after the 9th Symphony he had the plan of writing some grand oratorios in the style of Handel.
[281] Schumann wrote to Pohl in 1855, that Israel in Egypt was his “ideal of a choral work,” and, wishing to write a work called Luther, he defined this music thus, of which he found the ideal realized by Handel: “A popular oratorio that both country and town-people can understand.... A work of simple inspiration, in which the effect depends entirely on the melody and the rhythm, without contrapuntal artifice.”
Liszt, apropos of the Anthem Zadock the Priest, goes into ecstasies over “the genius of Handel, great as the world itself,” and very rightly perceives in the author of the Allegro and of Israel, a precursor of descriptive music.
[282] See, in Chrysander’s work, an article by Emil Krause, in the Monatshefte für Musikwissenschaft, 1904.
[283] A Société G. F. Handel was founded in Paris in 1909, under the direction of two conductors full of zeal and intelligence, MM. F. Borrel and F. Raugal. It has already done much to awaken the love of Handel in France by giving the large works hitherto unknown in France, such as Hercules, the Foundling Anthem, and the model performances of the Messiah at the Trocadero.
[284] Lessing, in the Preface to his Beiträge zur Historie und Aufnahme des Theaters (1750), gives as the principal characteristic of the German, “that he appreciates whatever is good, particularly where he finds it, and when he can turn it to his profit.”
[285] See the Voyage en Italie, May 18, 1787, letter to Herder.
[286] French Songs (MSS. in Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge): copies in the Schoelcher Collection, in the library of the Paris Conservatoire.
[287] See the Abbé Prévost: Le Pour et le Contre, 1733.