In the Marriage of Figaro he originated what Emil Naumann calls conversational opera, although Rossini’s Barber of Seville, and Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment follow it in style they do not reach it in real fun, melody and quality. When we say some of his operas were humorous we do not mean that they were comic operas.
In Don Giovanni he originated romantic opera, and although Weber in Oberon and other operas have their fine moments, none approach the awe-inspiring, continuous beauty of Mozart’s.
He was the first to write a great fairy opera, The Magic Flute, composed when he was writing the Requiem! Although the librettist wrote it for money, Mozart wanted it idealistic and true to his beliefs.
Cosi Fan Tutti (They’re All Alike) was really and truly comic opera, and Titus shows his mastery of the formal and severe style. So in all these he left models for those who followed him. Had he done but this one thing he would have been great indeed.
Coming into the world when he did, he was the connecting link between the old Italian opera and Gluck, who idealized what the old Florentines did, on the one hand, and the romantic and romantic comic opera of the later masters of Germany and France, on the other.
In instrumental music he is the link between Haydn and Beethoven. Let us see how! He furthered the work of Haydn in the quartets and quintets by making them more human and more expressive of sorrow, pain, passionate grief and the deeper things than Haydn. In his six quartets dedicated to Haydn he says, “I labored over these.” This does not agree with the usual statement, says Naumann, “that he shook his music out of his sleeve.”
Out of his forty-nine symphonies nine rank, some think, with Beethoven’s nine! In the finale of the Jupiter symphony he does so great a musical feat that as yet no one has surpassed it. For in it he writes a fugue along with the sonata form of the symphony, so spontaneous and so lovely that even Bach himself could not have reached the freshness of it.
Mozart treated the fugue with the same limpid mirthfulness that he used in less strict forms of music. This Beethoven never achieved for his fugues were always a bit labored, but Mozart was perfectly at home in contrapuntal writing.
Mozart also invented the art song! This is different from the regular song for the music changes from verse to verse to make the meaning of the poem or words more expressive. Thus he paved the way for Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and other great song writers, as he did for the symphonist Beethoven and those born later.
He opened the gate, not to a national art, but to an international art, for he was a world figure.