ensembles "Ach! so fromm, ach! so traut (M'apparì tutt'amor)" (Lyonel) "Blickt sein Aug" (Harriet and Lyonel) "Lasst mich euch fragen (Porter-Lied)" Drinking Song (Plunkett) "Letzte Rose (The Last Rose of Summer)" (Harriet, later with Lyonel) "Mag der Himmel Euch vergeben" (Lyonel's Prayer) "Schlafe wohl! Und mag Dich reuen" (Good Night Quartet) "Was soll ich dazu sagen?" (Spinning-Wheel Quartet) "Povero Lionello... Il mio Lionel" (Added by Flotow for baritone Graziani's Plunkett, solely in the Italian version) Musical content The overture is among von Flotow's most appreciated works. It begins with a slow A minor introduction, but changes suddenly to an A major theme (that of Lyonel's prayer in act 3, "Mag der Himmel Euch vergeben"), presented as an extended French horn solo with orchestral accompaniment that concludes with the theme stated by the full orchestra. It reverts to A minor with a busy, agitated motif for the Allegro, representing Lady Harriet and Nancy bustling about, leading into the slightly slower (meno moto) C major peasant girls' chorus theme from act 1, played by woodwinds accompanied by triangle and snare drum with pizzicato string punctuation. This concludes with a mini-coda for the full orchestra a tempo in C; then the agitated theme returns, but modulates several times from C through D minor and E minor to a section pitting the agitated theme in F major against Lyonel's prayer in the oboes, clarinets, and cellos in the midst of the orchestral texture, adding winds and brass to the theme in a crescendo until suddenly breaking off and reprising the peasant girls' chorus in A major. That leads without further modulation back to the Lyonel's prayer motif for full orchestra as in the beginning, and so the overture ends with a brisk, very short duple-meter coda. The fluctuations of light and shade are reminiscent of Schubertian scoring, or of Weber (e.g. Der Freischütz overture): but without modulation into remote tonalities, they never really portend a tragic conclusion, but rather the lovers' dilemmas and local color. Though the powerful overture hints at a darker outcome, the opera ends happily. The heroine's levity and Lyonel's sincerity are its themes. The dramatic music, as between Lyonel and Harriet in act 4, is weighty, while the scoring of the comic scenes is also (but differently) effective. In his own idiom, like Mozart in Don Giovanni or Verdi in Un ballo in maschera, von Flotow could build convivial music