"Woe unto them, who have abandoned me" -- is the Alto Soloist's first aria from Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's "Elijah." In this aria the voice of the Lord speaking to the prophet Elijah is revealed by the singer. It is as if Mendelssohn allows the listener to hear directly exactly what Elijah himself may have heard, when the Lord spoke to him. Thus, the music and the words of this aria are quite sad.

This is the moment after the great miracle occurs, in which the Lord sends a fire down upon an altar with a sacrifice on it, simply from hearing the prayers of Elijah -- in other words a fire appears from Elijah's prayers without any physical means. According to the writings of the Old Testament, that fire burnt up not only the sacrifice, but also deeply scorched the wood, the stones, the earth around the altar, and all of the water in the trenches that were surrounding this altar. This was what one could call a "divine fire."

The people are amazed by this fire, and at that moment Elijah also says the unthinkable -- he tells the people to go out and kill the false prophets of Baal, who were not able to produce such a fire with their empty prayers... Elijah pays heavily for ordering such a thing and has to run away into the wilderness for forty days to save his own life.

Live Performance from a concert at Pfingsten of "Weh ihnen, dass sie von mir weichen" from Mendelssohn's "Elijah" by Dorothea Fayne (Mezzo-Soprano) with Diana Wartenberg (Viola) and Uwe Streibel (Piano). May 2007.


Here is an English translation of the aria:

"Woe unto them, who have abandoned me!
They must be destroyed, since they have become detached from me.
I wanted to save them, if they wouldn't teach lies against me.
But, they wouldn't listen..."