read a second time") appeared shortly after #21, following the exit of the two Earls and the Lord Chancellor and the entrance of Strephon. The tone of the song is dark and angry, in marked contrast with the generally genial tone of Iolanthe, and the lyrics make the case that bad behaviour by the underclasses is caused by their unfortunate circumstances: "I might be as bad – as unlucky, rather – if I only had Fagin for a father." The music to this song survives, and although most productions continue to omit it, the song has been used in some modern productions and as a separate concert piece. Musical and textual analysis At the time they wrote Iolanthe, both Gilbert and Sullivan were in their peak creative years, and Iolanthe, their seventh work together, drew the best from both composer and author. Sullivan's biographer, Arthur Jacobs, wrote: "[Sullivan] had composed a brilliant new score (his most subtle yet) to a scintillating libretto. ... Iolanthe is the work in which Sullivan's operetta style takes a definite step forward, and metamorphosis of musical themes is its characteristic new feature. ... By recurrence and metamorphosis of themes Sullivan made the score more fluid". Sullivan's overture was superior in structure and orchestration to those that his assistants had constructed for the earlier operas. Much of his "fairy" music pays deliberate homage to the incidental music written by Felix Mendelssohn for an 1842 production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Richard Wagner's Ring cycle premiered in London earlier in 1882. The music for the fairies reflects Wagner's style, and the score uses leitmotifs, including a distinctive four-note theme associated with the character of Iolanthe. The Fairy Queen's music parodies that of Wagnerian heroines such as Brünnhilde. The score is wider in range of emotion and style, with innovative use of pizzicato strings, clever and varied underscoring of patter, the tender, sentimental eleventh-hour number for the title character, apt matching of the music to the absurd comedy of the lyrics, and a sustained first act finale with a series of dramatic situations that ends with the confrontation between the fairies and peers. Gilbert, too, was influenced by earlier works, including The Mountain Sylph by John Barnett. Two characters in Iolanthe, Strephon and Phyllis, are described as Arcadian shepherds. Arcadia was a legendary site of rural perfection, first described by the Ancient Greeks, that was a popular