And making a connection across the symphony, one of the finale's tunes is a hyperactive transformation of the unforgettable, lamenting oboe line you hear at the start of the Adagio.
For a change, more of you were watching the World Series finale than tuned in to the Colts-Texans' Monday Night Football game, but that might be because people flipped to that game, saw a bunch of unfamiliar names on the blue jerseys, deduced it was Manning playing some sort of pickup game and decided to try on their rally thongs.
Come 14 April, the day the finale will air, millions across Asia will be tuning in to find out.
But despite a tingling finale, the big tunes simply weren't big enough to move us and that, in the end, is what matters.
Outdoor music - miked up and pared down into bite-sized chunks - is served to an audience rewarded for its patience by a grand finale of jingoistic tunes and a dazzling firework display.
He brought scintillating spirits to the long finale, with its rustic tune, the kind of Austrian music that inspired Mahler in works like the Fourth Symphony.
The season finale, "Pee", features a tune sung by Cartman, "(Too Many Minorities) Not My Water Park", in which he despairs over the large number of African-American, Hispanic-American and Asian-American patrons at his water park.
The finale is a 10-tune Cole Porter songbook built around a sublime "So in Love" in which Porter's yearning melody hovers above a half-lit cloud of pastel-hued harmonies.
Though the mind-bending sci-fi show was down from last year's premiere (which earned a 1.5 rating in coveted the 18-49 demo) it was up 10percentt compared to last season's finale, with 3.2 million tuning in to watch the Observers take over the world.
He later learned, he said, that only a sort of spiritual tune in the finale had cost him the top honor.
