The Fire Descends

About this scene

Elijah calls the fire down, it falls from heaven onto his altar, and the people fall on their faces.

Elijah stands on Right in amber beside his altar, the unlit wood in the middle of Right; Baal's cold bronze altar is on Left, the people's candles along Porch Left and Porch Right, and Porch Front, heaven, is dark. As he sings "O Thou, who makest Thine angels spirits" silver points gather on Porch Front, more with each phrase, and on "Let them now descend!" they draw together into one hard light in the middle of heaven.

Then the chorus: fire from heaven. White breaks from Porch Front, runs down Porch Right toward the street (which reads as falling, in the street view) and lands on the altar, white to gold to red. Every "The fire descends from heav'n!" the people cry sends another streak down after it, and the altar burns with the orchestra's racing figure; Baal's bronze on Left goes colder. "Before Him upon your faces fall!": on every "fall" the people's candles drop to the floor of the porch and slowly rise, and in the hush before the chorale they stay down, the fire banked to embers. "The Lord is God": the candles rise, and warm light fills the house from the porch outward, swelling on each held chord, until "before the Lord" holds it there.

The music is Mendelssohn's own: No. 16, the recitative and the chorus's first six bars, then from "Before Him" to the end of the chorale, transcribed from the Novello octavo vocal score (1881) into the_fire_descends.musicxml and timed by scripts/score_excerpt.py at the marked tempos (the recitative at crotchet 69, Allegro con fuoco at crotchet 152), its fermatas held twice as long. Elijah is played on cellos and horns, the people on strings with woodwinds doubling and, in the chorale, the organ Mendelssohn's score has; the accompaniment is orchestrated from the piano reduction. A production adds the fire: a rush as it falls, a blow as it lands, the roar of the burning offering.