timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbals, side drum, triangle and glockenspiel), harp and the string section. At about 20 minutes in performance, In the South was the longest continuous orchestral piece Elgar had written to that date. It opens with a vigorous theme that he had written in 1899 in the visitors' book of his friend G. R. Sinclair to illustrate the latter's bulldog "triumphant after a fight". The music critic Michael Kennedy writes that "nothing in the whole of Elgar is more thrilling than the leaping opening". Sir Donald Tovey has compared it with the "Straussian panache" of Don Juan – "a group of heroic themes swinging along at full speed from the outset". The ebullient opening is followed by a calmer, pastoral section. The music then becomes agitated and moves into a grandioso section in A minor, illustrative of the days of the Roman empire, with what Elgar called "the relentless and domineering onward force of the ancient day" and the "drums and tramplings of a later time". This passage was inspired by the ruins of a huge Roman viaduct. From this theme a brilliant "striding" theme emerges and leads, through muted strings, to the second episode, quickly dubbed the "canto popolare". Kennedy suggests that giving this theme to the viola is a conscious homage to Berlioz's Harold in Italy. The theme recurs as a horn solo, before returning, over a drum-roll, to the viola, after which Elgar returns to the beginning of the overture for a formal recapitulation. After that, a nobilmente theme from the opening is transmuted into a gentle melody, which is developed to a final climax for full orchestra. Arrangements The "canto popolare" so convincingly struck an authentically Italian note that it was widely assumed to be an adaptation of a popular local song, although it was entirely of Elgar's own invention. Elgar later published a version of it with works taken from a poem by Shelley, as a song for soprano or tenor, under the title "In Moonlight". Ernest Newman, commented that the words and music were not a good match, with the rhythms of the verse "pushed and pulled" to fit the music: "you finally declare that by similar treatment anything – an Act of Parliament or a patent medicine advertisement – could be made to 'go with' the melody equally well". Elgar made an arrangement of the "canto popolare" for violin and