to tell: so much as one of airy wit and cunning
intrigue, of very little passion and very
much jealousy. His people are all in intense
earnest. His Countess could protest no
more tenderly than she does were hers a case
of real fascination, not merely a half-
compassionating fancy to listen to the foolish page.
His Cherubino's love-songs might be put into the
mouth of Romeo, without shaming the sincerity
of Juliet's lover. And his Susanna, while tricking
the Count, is as serious over the game, as
her master is over his discreditable pursuit.
Compare this music with that to a setting of
Beaumarchais's earlier play, into which something
of young romance and love do enter, "Il Barbiere."
Recollect that for years Signor Rossini
was scouted as flimsy and superficial, whereas
to breathe a whisper in criticism of Mozart,
amounted to positive blasphemy. Yet in Signor
Rossini's exquisite comedy every character is
characterised by the music allotted to it, in
Mozart's sentimental drama—not.

The above vein of observation could be
wrought out through all Mozart's musical
dramas. Even in the opera which Beethoven
declared was his only German work, "Die
Zauberflöte," when the temple music is set aside
(not, by the way, so rich and grave in its solemnity
as that of Gluck's "Alceste" and "Iphigenie"),
it is not easy to decide what was meant by the
maker in matter of humour. The Queen of
Night, whom we are invited to believe is in
a predicament of wrath, or passion, or distress,
"tops up" her lamentations with bravura
passages of heartless and mechanical display,
such as might have been written by a Galuppi,
or a Ciampi, for the Gabrielli or Bastardella of
the minute;—and hence that fairy extravaganza,
or masonic mystery (which is it?), of "The
Magic Flute" remains, and will remain to the
end of time, with some of us (on the stage), a
heavy and fatiguing riddle, in spite of the
luxury of beauty which it contains. In the
concert-room, where there is no thought of
sequence and connexion, the matter is different.
It is this power to charm of Mozart's music, when
removed from beyond the boundaries of the world
for which it was written, which has led those who
feel rather than distinguish, to enthrone him as
the greatest of stage-composers that ever lived.

How much of this symmetrical yet sometimes
irrational fluency of beauty may be ascribed
to the musician's training, who shall decide?
Taking the position of many who have made
music in Germany into account, Mozart was
favourably circumstanced in his childhood.
His father was a pious, sensible man; too
willing (as is the way with parents) to push
forward and produce the boy's prodigious
genius; more, however, from the pride of love
than from wishing to make merchandise of it.
His mother was a faithful, affectionate woman.
The court of the Prince-Bishop of Saltzburg,
against the tyrannies of which biographers
have been apt to rave, appears to have been, its
time considered, a safe and creditable residence
as compared with other German courts, the
coarse and brutal sensuality of which required
nothing less than a political earthquake for their
cleansing. We can gather from Mozart's letters
(a strange medley of shrewdness, domestic
affection, musical foresight and insight, and sensual
coarseness) that his education cannot have been
neglected. He was a good linguist, a fair
mathematician. To one of his peculiar temperament,
however, the career of precocious exhibition
and wandering into which he was launched,
when quite a child, could hardly fail to prove
fatal,—as exhausting youth, sapping the
foundations of self-denial, developing every appetite
and passion, substituting flattery for truth,
familiarising the youth with luxuries belonging
to other worlds than his own. How far a more
bracing education, not severer (for severe must
be the toil of any Prodigy who would keep up
the excitement of curiosity), might have
modified the master's music, adding to it nerve,
without any loss of beauty, and something more
of thought, which means something less of
manner—how, had his life, every hour of which
he lived (draining pleasure and labour to the
dregs), begun later, it might have lasted longer—
are speculations which will tantalise those who
study art in connexion with character, and
which, though impossible to be solved, are not
wholly profitless. Meanwhile, the certain wonder
is, that in Mozart's brief and feverish life he
could achieve so much (let us range it where
and how we may), which will last as long as a
note of music is to be heard in the world.

It would not be easy, it may be repeated, to
name a musician, in whom with such boundless
versatility so much manner is combined, as in the
case of Mozart. Accordingly, never had master a
larger school of imitators, unless, perhaps, it was
Raphael in painting. Betwixt the genius of the
two men there seems to be a great affinity.
But the mass of the Mozart-ish music left,
whether in the form of instrumental, or sacred,
or theatrical composition, is of a depressing
and regular mediocrity, to which only one fate
could happen. To confine ourselves to opera,
there can be little question that Winter, perhaps
the most significant of the company, whose
earlier efforts are quite forgotten, on returning
to Vienna from Italy in 1794, endeavoured to
catch the mantle of the deceased poet. Till
lately his forty-fourth opera, "The Interrupted
Sacrifice," existed in the theatres of Germany;
and we have not altogether forgotten the
"Proserpine," which he wrote for London, in
display of Mrs. Billington and Signora Grassini.
But the level staleness and correct suavity
of this music (representative of that which German
chapel-masters manufactured by the yard)
can be no longer endured; and it is not to be wondered
at, that by those who mistook the reverse of
wrong for right—that easiest of moral processes
—the rejection of that, which, however accurately
made, however classic in its pretensions,
is essentially so devoid of life, soul, and spirits,
should hurry on that movement in German opera
music, the end of which (though we are already
on the very confines of chaos) has yet to come.