On the other extreme, some held up Handel's music, especially his religious English oratorios, as the absolute embodiment of English musical style. As a result, English music and Handel in particular gained a false reputation on the European continent as being overly moral and religious.

This has been a difficult reputation for Handel to shake, even in the 20th and 21st centuries. Because his most significant contribution to the development of Baroque music and Western culture in general was the English oratorio, and because his most famous and crowd-pleasing oratorio by far has always been and remains today the Messiah, Handel is inextricably tied in the modern mind to one musical form and one piece of music in particular. Because of this, he enjoys neither the public acknowledgement that the breadth of his compositional achievement deserves, nor the scholarly interest that has been given more "dynamic" composers like Mozart and...
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