WHEN Bach died Haydn had already embarked on his career
as composer, for by 1750 he had written his first extant
Mass and string quartet. Handel overlapped Mozart, born in
1756, by three years and it was only three years after that that Mozart
composed (under his father's ambitious direction) his earliest pieces.
Yet there is little evident continuity between the great masters of the
first half of the eighteenth century and those of the second. We have
seen that Bach--though well aware of and indebted to the Italian
tradition--made himself essentially a local, Leipzig composer, adapting
his style and his genius to the needs of his environment; and that
Handel, proceeding from the advanced Italian technique of the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth century, conformed to the looser,
but none the less distinguishable, expectations of the English.

The glory of Europe formerly was in the cultural independence of
many regions--Venice, Florence, Rome, Dresden, Munich, Vienna,
Mannheim, Salzburg, Paris. The reader should turn to the elegant
enthusiasm of Dr. Burney Travels (The Present State of Music in France
and Italy, London, 1773, and The Present State of Music in Germany, the
Netherlands and United Provinces, London, 1775) to appreciate the
genius of each place that he visited. The Masses of Haydn and Mozart
vary in manner and in point of view not only because of the explora-
tory character of each of these composers but because conditions at
Esterház and Salzburg called forth different attributes. Similarities
between the composers were due to a certain technical community of
outlook, to a reliance on certain masters held in esteem in Austria and,
therefore, by Haydn and Mozart, but subsequently largely forgotten.

We will, for the moment, leave aside such works as Haydn's
oratorios and Mozart's Masonic music and examine the background
to their main choral works, which were for the Catholic Church. And
here is one reason (among many) for deviation from the Protestant

-156-