The Mendelssohn Greek choruses are far beyond and above the ordinary part-song, which is a much smaller, humbler affair,--simply, as its name denotes, a _song_, harmonized in four parts. But these are themes worked up, for single and double choir, with as complete art as the choruses in great oratorios, only avoiding the Fugue form, which is Gothic, Christian, suggestive of the Infinite, not Greek. Racine's _Athalie_, often called his greatest drama, is constructed after the old Greek model, with choruses similarly employed. Mendelssohn's music for it, compared with _St. Paul_ and _Elijah_, the _Lobgesang_, or the Greek plays, must to many seem monotonous, in some parts dry and tame. The musical work, bound by the text, lacks climax. Yet there is much beautiful and some majestic, splendid music in it. Has it a Jewish, as its congeners a Greek flavor? The overture is very noble, with the two parts finely contrasted. During the last years of his life the dramatic tendency in Mendelssohn, which we have traced all along through so many of his works in many forms, from his child operettas in his father's house to the _Walpurgis Night_, grew upon him with an irresistible momentum. His deep interest in Jenny Lind (Goldschmidt), who was his ideal of a singer, and to whom he became a most devoted friend, led him as the last musical problem of his life to write an opera for her in which she was to take the principal rôle in London. That was _Die Lorelei_, a theme as legendary and romantic, while more poetic and more inviting to music, than the monster Norse mythology. The composition was cut short by his early death. The fragments which he left of the unfinished work are of such rare excellence, that one wonders what might have been, had that ideal been achieved! Might not the German theatre have then possessed an opera, a lyric drama, which would have forestalled the paradoxical solution of the problem which so many, whether musical or not, appear so overready to accept? And how long will the fashion hold?