the note seems to have haunted his mind when he wrote the air, “Hear Ye, Israel”). But Jenny Lind was unavailable and he had to be satisfied with a Maria Caradori-Allan, whom he disliked and whose singing he afterwards described as “so pretty, so pleasing, so elegant and at the same time so flat, so unintelligent, so soulless that the music acquired a sort of amiable expression about which I could go mad”. Be all of which as it may, Caradori-Allan was paid as much for singing in the first “Elijah” as Mendelssohn was for composing it! The precious creature actually told him at a rehearsal that “Hear Ye, Israel” was “not a lady’s song,” and asked him to have it transposed and otherwise altered.