Mark Swed deemed Allen's production one of the top ten moments in classical music for 2008, and applauded it for "hilarious wit and engaging musicality". Allen Rich of Variety praised the piece, though he disliked Allen's idea of beginning the opera with a montage of old film clips, with credits featuring mock-Italian names. Music Giuseppe Verdi said of Puccini, early in the latter's career, that "the symphonic element dominates in him", and has been compared by later analysts to that of the final presto movement of a three-movement symphony. With the fast-moving pace of the work, the set pieces are given a simpler melodic structure than those in the other two parts of the triptych. On stage, with the references, a humorous atmosphere is established from the very beginning. However, the music itself is of the 20th century; Edward Greenfield refers to its "dissonant modernity", with simultaneous clashing chords suggesting that "Puccini was beginning to think in bi-tonal terms". Alongside these dissonant passages are others which opera scholar Julian Budden calls "bland, schoolroom diatonism". Puccini's score is built around a series of motifs that recur through the opera, generally representing characters, situations and moods though sometimes without specific associations. The opening motif is a rapid burst of rhythmic music, described by Greenfield as of "almost Stravinskian sharpness", which quickly transforms into a mock-solemn dirge depicting the hypocritical grief of the Donati relatives. This juxtaposition of the humorous and the solemn pervades the opera; critic Ernest Newman suggests that it "keeps us perpetually suspended between the comic and the tragic". Other principal motifs include the theme associated with the lovers Rinuccio and Lauretta, introduced in Rinuccio's first solo , and a short, formal woodwind statement that represents Donati's will. Rinuccio sings the name "Gianni Schicchi" to a jaunty four-note phrase which becomes Schicchi's personal motif, and it is heard again as Schicchi knocks on the door before his first appearance. The best-known theme in the opera, that associated with Lauretta, is introduced in the second part of Rinuccio's aria . The theme is briefly played on clarinet and violin as Lauretta enters with Schicchi, before its full expression in . Budden dismisses the view that Lauretta's aria, at the midpoint of the opera, was a concession to popular taste; rather, "its position at the turning point of the action is precisely calculated to provide a welcome moment of lyrical repose". Andrew