 The Sullivan scholar Gervase Hughes characterised Sir Roderic's song "When the night wind howls" as "unquestionably the finest piece of descriptive music that Sullivan ever wrote, worthy of a place beside Schubert's "Erlkönig", Wagner's overture to "The Flying Dutchman", and well above Saint-Saëns' "Danse macabre", all of which are tone-paintings in a similar colour.Although the vocal score gives not a hint of the uncanny brilliance of the orchestration, it demonstrates the sure footholds by which the music in a round dozen bars finds its way from D minor to A flat major and back and the shattering impact of the fortissimo chorus entry at an interrupted cadence on the chord of B flat major.The progressions that follow look to be unusual, but if we study them carefully we realise that here Sullivan is not feeling his way in unfamiliar territory.