fore-feeling of the higher powers which henceforth are to take part in the drama. But first we have the masterpiece and model of all tenor solos. In it Ottavio commends his _Il mio tesoro_ to the care of these friends, and in it he proves himself the truest, tenderest, most devoted and most religious of lovers, if Heaven _has_ reserved it to a stronger force than his to crush the mighty sinner against whom he has taken such an oath of vengeance. But the opera could not rob itself of the statue, and its last scene, and its whole sublimity, to make him a hero, when it was enough that he should know how to _love_ a Donna Anna. Passing over a duett between Leporello and Zerlina, rarely sung, in fact an after-thought of the composer, which he is said to have added to conciliate the lower taste of a Viennese manager or audience; and passing over (for we must be brief) a truly transcendent solo for Elvira: _Mi tradi quell’ alma ingrata_, in whose fluid, ever-modulating melody her musing, sad soul seems dissolved in reverie, we come to the marvelous church-yard scene. Here glimmers the white equestrian statue of the murdered commander in the back-ground; and here the Don and Leporello seek a rendezvous after their new discomfiture, to re-exchange hats and mantles, and so forth. Their loud levity is suddenly hushed by a voice of warning from the statue, accompanied in strange chords by the unearthly tones of the trombones (which instruments, instead of being lavished in Verdi fashion, upon all the strong passages, have been entirely kept back till now for this supernatural “beginning of the end,”) mingled with the low reed tones. _Di rider finirai_, etc. (“Thou shalt cease to laugh before dawn!”) A short old choral strain, in which the voice ends, spectral-like, upon the Dominant of the key (A minor), struck with the major Third. This is a church cadence; it belongs to eternity, which knows no Minor, no such type of “earthly un-rest.” It freezes to the heart of Don Giovanni, who starts dismayed, but only for a moment; and soon the marble lips break silence once more to rebuke his mockery. So far it has been introductory recitative; but now the orchestra is all life and melody again, for the luscious music of the duett in which Giovanni compels the trembling servant at the sword’s point to salute the statue and invite him to sup with him. There is no more exquisite fairy-work in the whole opera than the instrumentation of this scene. It were hard to tell whether the impression left by it partakes most of the comic, of the supernaturally terrible, or of the beautiful. All these elements are grotesquely blended in it, yet without seeming incongruity. The beauty of the music harmonizes and idealizes the action; it lends its singular fascination to the marvelous; it makes the terror doubly real, by expressing the vague charm which every terror has after all to the soul, glad (even in its terror) of the excitement