Baal, We Cry to Thee

About this scene

The priests of Baal call on their god around his bronze altar on Left, two choirs answering.

The scene opens where the last one ended: Baal's burnished altar on Left, Elijah's amber on Right beside his unlit wood, the people's candles on Porch Left and Porch Right, the last of Ahab's grey fading. Then the priests begin, a double chorus calling in turn. The tenors and basses are the half of Left toward the Side corner, the trebles and altos the half toward the porch, and every syllable a choir sings flares its half bronze. On every accented "Baal!" the whole run flashes, a brass glint is flung from the altar up Left toward the porch (higher for a higher note) and falls back, and the people's candles flinch.

At each fortissimo "hear and answer us!" the two choirs sing together, the whole of Left blazes and a bronze reach pushes out along Porch Left toward heaven, and dies before it gets there. Porch Front, heaven, stays dark through all of it. The Allegro's first bars close the scene: a glint racing up Left with every note of the orchestra's figure, the priests working themselves up for what comes next.

The music is Mendelssohn's own: the Andante grave of No. 11 and the first bars of its Allegro, transcribed from the Novello octavo vocal score into baal_we_cry.musicxml and timed by scripts/score_excerpt.py at the marked tempos, four bars of the repeated "Heed the sacrifice" left out. The priests are played on brass, as in Hear and Answer: trebles on trumpets, altos on horns, tenors on trombones, basses on tuba, with woodwinds doubling; timpani with every accented "Baal!", and a bass drum and cymbal under the fortissimo cries.