stout-hearted to the last, in spite of Leporello’s trembling, grotesque warnings, accepts. The statue asks his hand in pledge; he boldly gives it, starts as if an infinite pang and sense of death shot from the cold, stony hand through all the marrow of his bones; with an infinite audacity of will he refuses to repent; the spectre sinks through the ground; he is a doomed one; the flames of hell burst in on every side, with visions of the damned; a chorus of spectres: _vieni!_ (come!) is heard amid the infernal whirl and tempest of the music; he wrestles with the demons and drops dead, the whole phantasmagoria vanishing, just as the other characters of the piece come in search of the reprobate, who listen to Leporello’a chattering story, dispose of their several destinies after the approved fashion of dramatic conclusions, and wind up with chanting a solemn canon over the _Dissoluto punito_, to the words: “Such is the end of the evil-doer!” It is usual, however, to terminate the performance with the fall of Giovanni. The parts which follow, although admirable as music, are plainly superfluous to the action, as a poetic and artistic whole, and must have been added by Mozart out of mere conformity to old dramatic usage, which assembles and disposes of all the surviving characters of a piece in the last scene. There is great room for melodramatic nonsense and _diablerie_ in this judgement scene, in which the theatres have used full license. But if the orchestra be complete and efficient, there is no possibility of travestying or perverting the sublime and terrible intention of the music, which from the moment that the statue enters is enough to freeze one’s blood, and preoccupies all avenues of sense or consciousness with supernatural and infinite suggestions. And yet does Music’s sweet and faithful prophecy of reconciliation, like the “still, small voice” out of the inmost heart of things, still reach us somehow through it all! * * * * *