22. "I have an unspeakable desire to compose another opera….In Italy one can acquire more honor and credit with an opera than with a hundred concerts in Germany, and I am the happier because I can compose, which, after all, is my one joy and passion….I am beside myself as soon as I hear anybody talk about an opera, sit in a theatre or hear singing."
(Munich, October 11, 1777, to his father, reporting an expectation of making a position for himself in Italy.)
23. "I beg of you do your best that we may go to Italy. You know my greatest longing—to write operas….Do not forget my wish to write operas! I am envious of every man who composes one; I could almost weep from chagrin whenever I hear or see an aria. But Italian, not German; seria not buffa."
(Mannheim, February 2, 1778, to his father. Mozart wanted to go with the Weber family (he was in love with Aloysia, his future sister-in-law) to Italy while his father was desirous that he should go to Paris.)
24. "I am strongly possessed by the desire to write an opera— French rather than German, but Italian rather than either German or French. Wendling's associates are all of the opinion that my compositions would please extraordinarily in Paris. One thing is certain; I would not fear the test. As you know I am able to assimilate and imitate pretty much all styles of composition."
(Mannheim, February 7, 1778, to his father. Wendling was a flautist in Mannheim.)
25. "I assure you that if I get a commission to compose an opera I shall not be frightened. True the (French) language is of the devil's own making, and I fully appreciate all the difficulties that composers have encountered; but I feel myself as capable of overcoming them as any other composer. Au contraire when I convince myself that all is well with my opera, I feel as if my body were afire—my hands and feet tremble with desire to make the Frenchman value and fear the German. Why is no Frenchman ever commissioned to write a grand opera? Why must it always be a foreigner? In my case the most unendurable thing would be the singers. Well, I'm ready. I shall begin no dickerings, but if I am challenged I shall know how to defend myself. But I should prefer to get along without a duel; I do not like to fight with dwarfs."
(Paris, July 31, 1778, to his father.)
26. "Do you imagine that I would write an opera comique in the same manner as an opera seria? There must be as little learning and seriousness in an opera buffa as there must be much of these elements in an opera seria; but all the more of playfulness and merriment. I am not responsible for the fact that there is a desire also to hear comic music in an opera seria; the difference is sharply drawn here. I find that the buffoon has not been banished from music, and in this respect the French are right."
(Vienna, June 16, 1781, to his father. Mozart draws the line of demarcation sharply between tragedy and comedy in opera. ["Shakespeare has taught us to accept an infusion of the comic element in plays of a serious cast; but Shakespeare was an innovator, a Romanticist, and, measured by old standards, his dramas are irregular. The Italians, who followed classic models, for a reason amply explained by the genesis of the art-form, rigorously excluded comedy from serious operas, except as intermezzi, until they hit upon a third classification, which they called opera semiseria, in which a serious subject was enlivened with comic episodes. Our dramatic tastes being grounded in Shakespeare, we should be inclined to put down 'Don Giovanni' as a musical tragedy; or, haunted by the Italian terminology, as opera semiseria; but Mozart calls it opera buffa, more in deference to the librettist's work, I fancy, than his own."—"How to Listen to Music," page 221. H.E.K.])