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In Mendelssohn’s Elijah, the following phrase is nearly always sung as written, unless the singer is familiar with the best traditions:
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It may be that the artists who slavishly follow the published text fear being accused of altering the composer’s music, or are ignorant of the fact that there exists a better version, which is this:
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It will be seen that the music is not changed in the least; the musical and verbal accents have been merely readjusted and made to coincide.
In order to avoid the disagreeable effect of singing one half-bar andante to the syllable “si” (pronounced like “zee” in English), the following phrase of Marguerite de Valois in Les Huguenots (Meyerbeer), Act II, is changed thus: