have silently dropped away, unregarded and unregretted:  whatever the outlooks, and they are many and various, they are more clear-sighted, more sincere.  Here in England we have somewhat lagged behind:  we have had, not perhaps altogether fairly but indubitably, a reputation for national hypocrisy to sustain, and our religious music has only with difficulty shaken itself loose.  Not very long ago, Saint-Saens’s Samson and Delilah, now one of the most popular of operas, could only be performed as an oratorio:  it dealt with biblical incidents and characters, therefore it was religious music, therefore it could not be given stage presentation.  Of course this kind of attitude is never logical:  for a long time we closed Covent Garden to Strauss’s Salome for the same reason, but no one, so far as I know, ever proposed to endow it with a religious halo.  Now, when Sunday secular music is everywhere, its origins seem lost in antiquity; but the chamber-music concerts at South Place in London and Balliol College in Oxford, which are, I think I am right in saying, the twin pioneers, are both little over thirty years old.  In most other countries, however, music has suffered far fewer checks of this kind; and it is of more importance to correlate musical and religious development on more general lines.  Particularly interesting, I think, is the history of the decline of the oratorio, which I should myself be inclined to date from the production of the German Requiem of Brahms about half a century ago, though the real impetus has become apparent only during the last generation.

Brahms’s Requiem was indeed something of a portent:  it was a definite herald of revolt.  The mere title, ‘A German Requiem’, involving the commandeering of the name hitherto associated exclusively with the ritual of the Roman Church and the practice of prayers for the dead, and its adaptation to entirely different words, was in itself of the utmost significance; and the significance was enhanced by the character of the words themselves.  In the first place, they were self-selected on purely personal lines; in the second place, they were, theologically, hardly so much as Unitarian.  Brahms claimed the right to express his own individual view of the problem, and at a length which involved the corollary that the problem was regarded in its completeness.  The ’German Requiem’ cannot be considered, as an anthem might be, as an expression of a mere portion of a complete conception of the particular religious problem:  in an organic work of this length, what it does not assert it implicitly denies or at any rate disregards.  And this was at once recognized, both by Brahms’s opponents and by himself:  he categorically refused to add any dogmatically Christian element to his scheme.  Similarly with his Ernste Gesaenge, written some thirty years later, at the end of his life:  he balances the reflections on death taken from Ecclesiastes and similar sources with the Pauline chapter on faith,