These indulgences are interrupted by two 'intermezzos', the first one a sinister murmuring of repressed agitation, the second one a ghostly 'Wilde Jagd' (Wild Hunt).
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The mechanical quality of the middle part suggests an ‘automaton'. (The mechanism winds down at the ritardando, Bb. 93-94). The idea of an artificial ‘person’ haunted Romantic imagination and 'automatons' appear frequently in writers such as E.T.A. Hoffmann or Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49).