Here mark a fine point in the action, a fine touch of poetic truth, worthy of Mozart’s genius. It is _she_, his better nature, as we have said, his own rejected truer self, who loves him better than he loves himself; it is she, Elvira, who, as she leaves the stage, is the first to meet the fearful apparition and by her shriek give warning. That shriek, thrown into the music, has suddenly changed its smooth, sparkling surface into fierce boiling eddies, and stirred up the whole sea of harmony from its profoundest depths. The musicians on the stage have vanished. No time now for their toy melodies! Every chord now cleaves the dark veil of the supernatural, like lightnings in the blackest night; the syncopated rhythm tells of vague and wonderful forebodings. _Che grido è questo?_ (What noise is this?) And Leporello is sent out to see. Wilder and heavier grows the music, as he returns white and speechless, and only able in his half-wittedness of terror to imitate with his feet the heavy _ta, ta_, the approaching foot-fall of the man of marble, who has descended from his charger in the grave-yard. It requires the master’s hardihood to open the door for him, and amid those solemn and terrific crashes of the orchestra, with which the overture commenced, the strange guest stalks into the middle of the scene. With hard, ponderous, marble tones, like blows, falling whole octaves, the statue announces himself as good as his word in accepting Giovanni’s invitation. The amazed unbeliever, trembling and yet summoning up his whole pride of will, which never yet forsook him, would fain prove as good as _his_ word, too, and orders Leporello, who has crawled away under the table, to get ready another supper. But “not on mortal food feeds” this guest from the other world; “graver concerns” have led him here; and the instruments are again traversing those _unsettled_ scales, whose wonderful effect we noticed in the overture. _Parla, parla_: rings out the rich, fresh baritone of the dauntless Amphytrion, as much as to say: “talk on, old fellow! I listen; you are a ghost, but I am a substance; I believe in myself, say what you will.” All very brave! but listen to the orchestra (as you cannot _help_ listening) if you would know how nevertheless it goes with him in the inner workings of his soul, in those mysterious depths of consciousness which hitherto he has so wilfully refrained from sounding. That heavy, muffled tread of the sub-bass in triplets, making the ground quake, means more than the “tertian ague” of poor Leporello there, with head thrust out cautiously from under the table, and voice, automaton-like, moving in unison with the _basso profondo_ of the orchestra. A pause is filled with a monotonous beat of the basses, when the crashing diminished-seventh chords begin anew, and louder than before, while the spectre again opens its marble jaws to tender the Don an invitation in its turn, which he,