With a strange perversity and persistency, musical students and the
public have been led to believe that the surest sign of supreme
musical inspiration is the power to dash off melodies as fast as the
pen can travel. Weber relates in his autobiographic sketch that he
wrote the second act of one of his early operas in ten days, and adds,
significantly, that this was "one of the many unfortunate results of
the wonderful anecdotes about great masters, which make a deep
impression on youthful minds, and incite them to imitation."

Mozart has always been pointed to by preference to show how a really
great master shakes his melodies from his sleeves, as it were. Yet, on
reading Jahn's elaborate account of Mozart's life and works, nothing
strikes one more than the emphasis he places on the amount of
preliminary labor which Mozart expended on his compositions, before he
wrote them down. It appears to be a well-authenticated fact that
Mozart postponed writing the overture to "Don Giovanni," until the
midnight preceding the evening when the opera was to be performed in
public; and that at seven o'clock in the morning, the score was ready
for the copyist, although he had been drinking punch and was so sleepy
that his wife had to allow him to doze for two hours, and kept him
awake the rest of the time by telling him funny stories. But this
incident loses much of its marvellous character, when we bear in mind
that Mozart, according to his usual custom, must have had every bar of
the overture worked out in his head, before he sat down to commit it
to paper. This last labor was almost purely mechanical, and for this
reason, whenever he was engaged in writing down his scores, he not
only worked with amazing rapidity, but did not object to conversation,
and even seemed to like it; and on one occasion when at work on an
opera, he wrote as fast as his hands could travel, although in one
adjoining room there was a singing teacher, in another a violinist,