The Curse

About this scene

Elijah swears there will be no dew nor rain, and the drought spreads over the house with the overture.

The house begins alive: soft green with blue dew glinting along every run, the people's candles on Porch Left and Porch Right. Elijah stands on Right in amber. Before any overture, the brass chords sound and he swears: "As God the Lord of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word." Every chord under him burns his amber one notch further outward along the roofline, scorching the green; on the fortissimo before "but according to my word" it flares across the whole of Right and into the porch, and on the held last chord it stays.

Then the overture's fugue, the drought itself: the subject creeps up from the bass, and with every note of it the dust front moves one step from Right toward the far end of Side, the colour draining out behind it to dry ochre. When the answer comes in a fifth higher the front speeds up, faster as the music tightens, until the whole house is dust and only the people's candles are left, guttering low, where Help, Lord! begins.

The music is Mendelssohn's own: the Introduction and the overture's first nine bars, transcribed from the Novello octavo vocal score into the_curse.musicxml and timed by scripts/score_excerpt.py at the marked tempos (Grave at crotchet 60, the overture at crotchet 92), the fermatas held twice as long. The chords are on trombones and tuba, Elijah on cellos and horns, the fugue subject on cellos and basses and the answer on violas. A production adds a dry wind that rises as the drought spreads.