The damage done to orchestras by absentee music directors may take longer to show through given the astonishing competence of professional musicians, who can get by with almost anyone on the podium. It is to conductors that the breach has proved most disastrous. Previn and Ozawa are cases of music fatigue. Less visible are the younger casualties who drop out from overwork and lose their bearings before they attain prominence. The umbilical cord that Karajan cut between a music director and his orchestra has snarled up and started to strangle the conducting profession.

In the fundamental nature of their respective individualities and methods of work they also differ from each other as completely as it is possible for two artists to do. Handel was a somewhat careless and unequal writer, and if he survives to-day in our concert-rooms practically by virtue of one single work, the Messiah, the reason is to be found in the fact that, although almost all his other works are full of the most admirable sections, these are found side by side with others so markedly inferior as to be almost commonplace. All his works, in fact, with the one notable exception already alluded to, are mere centos - gigantic improvisations, thrown off with effortless rapidity in heedless profusion and pieced together with the utmost nonchalance, in which sublimity and triviality, inspiration and mere hack journeyman's work are strangely intermingled. Bach on the contrary, despite his equally gigantic output, was evidently a slow and painstaking worker. He may have actually written his music down with great rapidity, but it is impossible to doubt that each work must nevertheless have been the outcome of a long period of intensely concentrated thought and spiritual gestation. While Handel's scores are frequently so sketchy and hastily written that it has often been found to be impossible to perform them satisfactorily as they actually stand, without some measure of alteration and adaptation. Bach's works are almost invariably carefully realized and executed, perfectly finished in detail, and can for the most part be performed to-day without the alteration or addition of a single note. In fact we may say that Handel's vast output resembles the ruins of Pompeii, in which an occasional building here and there has miraculously escaped total destruction by the ashes and cinders of oblivion, but that the work of Bach is a musical Herculaneum, hermetically sealed up by the lava of contemporary neglect, which has remained intact throughout the ages, and has only recently been unearthed, to the wonder and admiration of men. Handel to-day is paying the penalty for his instantaneous success, recognition, and popularity, and for the homage of the age for which he wrote; Bach now, at long last, reaps the reward of writing, not consciously perhaps, for posterity - probably no great artist ever does - but for himself alone, or, what is very much the same thing, ad majorem Dei gloriam.