Analysis of music and text

Musical content

The Sullivan scholar Gervase Hughes characterised Sir Roderic's song "When the night wind howls" as "unquestionably the finest piece of descriptive music that Sullivan ever wrote, worthy of a place beside Schubert's Erlkönig, Wagner's overture to The Flying Dutchman, and well above Saint-Saëns' Danse macabre, all of which are tone-paintings in a similar colour. Although the vocal score gives not a hint of the uncanny brilliance of the orchestration, it demonstrates the sure footholds by which the music in a round dozen bars finds its way from D minor to A flat major and back and the shattering impact of the fortissimo chorus entry at an interrupted cadence on the chord of B flat major. The progressions that follow look to be unusual, but if we study them carefully we realise that here Sullivan is not feeling his way in unfamiliar territory. Rather we may find in these few bars an apotheosis of his matured harmonic resource."^[51]