And first the Overture, composed, they say, in the single night before the first public performance of the opera in Prague; his wife keeping him awake to his work by punch and anecdotes and fairy tales, that made him laugh till the tears ran down his cheeks; and only ready for the orchestra (which had not its equal in all Europe) to play at sight without rehearsal. He may have _written_ it that night, that is to say, have copied it out of his head. It was his habit of composition; his musical conceptions shaped themselves whole in his brain, and were carried about there for days until the convenient time to put them upon paper; and it is not possible that his brain that time could have been without an overture, since there the opera existed as a perfect whole, and in that glowing and creative mood, the instrumental theme and preface to the same must have floated before him as naturally as the anticipation of his audience. Moreover, the first movement of it, the Andante, is essentially the same music with the grand and awful finale of the opera, and is properly put first in the overture (whose office it is to prepare the hearer’s mind) as the grand end and moral of the piece. Accordingly it opens with three stern, startling crashes on the chord of D minor, the sub-bass dividing the measure into equal halves, but the upper parts syncopated; then a pause, and then the same repeated in the Dommant—like the announcement of a power not to be trifled with. Then a series of wild modulations, full of terror, enhanced by the unearthly brass and low reed tones, surging through chromatic intervals, which make the blood creep, and presently overtopped by a pleading melody of the first violins, while a low, feeble whimper of the second violins is heard all the time like the moaning of the wind about an old house. Then alternate sharp calls and low, tremulous pauses; the ground quakes; the din becomes more fearful; the melody begins to traverse up and down all kinds of scales, through intervals continually shifting, and expressive of all manner of uncertainty, like the quick and fruitless runs in all directions of a beast surrounded by the hunters. It is like the breaking up of the familiar foundations of things, that unsettling of the musical Scale!—All this is brief, for it is but a synopsis and foreshadowing of the last scene in the opera. The string instruments then dash off, in the major of the key, into a wild, reckless kind of Allegro, than which there could not be a better musical correspondence of the general subject, that is, of the restless, mischievous career of one outraging all the social instincts and defying all pursuit. This spends itself at leisure, softening at the close toward the genial F natural, the key of nature and the senses, where the overture is merged into the dramatic introduction.