Help, Lord!

About this scene

The people cry out in the drought, the harvest falls away, and they lift their prayer to a silent sky.

The house is the drought EL01 left: dry ochre dust on every run, Porch Front (heaven) dark, the people's candles low on Porch Left and Porch Right. The chorus cries "Help, Lord!" three times: on each cry every candle flares and the flare runs up both porch runs toward heaven, then gutters back, lower each time. Under them the orchestra's chords rush down and up the scale, and a hot wind of ochre sweeps the wings with them, out to the ends of Left and Right and back. "Wilt thou quite destroy us?": the candles shrink from the back of the porch toward the street.

Then "The harvest now is over, the summer days are gone": the voices enter one after another, and every note they sing lets fall a band of harvest gold from the back of the porch, down the porch runs toward the street and out along the wings, fading as it goes, a slow downward wave for each voice. Last the chorus in unison, "Lord, bow thine ear to our pray'r!": the candles lift, light climbing both porch runs to the very edge of heaven, and Porch Front stays dark.

The music is Mendelssohn's own: No. 1's first fourteen bars and the unison chorus that opens No. 2, transcribed from the Novello octavo vocal score into help_lord.musicxml and timed by scripts/score_excerpt.py at the marked tempos (Andante lento at crotchet 76; Sostenuto, quaver 100). The people are on strings with woodwinds doubling, the rushing chords on the strings with the brass under the cries; a production adds the dry wind.