to transfigure and glorify a tune which would form an appropriate part of the service at a Protestant Sunday School and which dramatically is probably quite in keeping with the Protestant Sunday School ideas of the two babes in the forest. It may be said, however, with its unimaginative succession of tonic and dominant chords and plentiful arpeggios, to represent one of the weakest moments in the score. Arpeggios, by the way, are seemingly an essential accompaniment to anything heavenly. It is not alone Little Eva who expires to them; even Richard Strauss invokes their aid for his balefully banal heaven music in his tone-poem, Death and Transfiguration, an episode which sends some of us away from the concert hall fully determined never to do any good in this world for fear we may be consigned to listen to such vapid music all our immortal lives. Heaven, indeed, must be a dull place to inspire such saccharine chords in the composer of the acescent and biting Elektra. Again, in The Legend of Joseph, an angel steps our way to a tune which suggests that Strauss is not at his best when thinking of heaven. Nor is Mascagni who, in Iris, introduces us to a Japanese paradise, via a lotus-flower route, much more
musique where the angel comes down; which is so sweet that it ravished me; and, indeed, in a word did wrap up my soul, so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife, that I could think of nothing else."
