CONCERNING THE OPERA



When he was twenty-two years old Mozart wrote to his father,
"I am strongly filled with the desire to write an opera." Often
does he speak of this ambition. It was, in fact, his true and
individual field as the symphony was that of Beethoven. He took
counsel with his father by letter touching many details in his
earlier operas, wherefore we are advised about their origin, and,
what is more to the purpose, about Mozart's fine aesthetic
judgment. His four operatic masterpieces are imperishable, and a
few words about them are in place, particularly since Mozart has
left numerous and interesting comments on "Die Entfuhrung aus dem
Serail." This first German opera he composed with the confessed
purpose of substituting a work designed for the "national lyric
stage" for the conventional and customary Italian opera. Despite
its Hispano-Turkish color, the work is so ingenuous, so German in
feeling, and above all so full of German humor that the success
was unexampled, and Mozart could write to his father: "The people
are daft over my opera." Here, at the very outset, Mozart's
humor, the golden one of all the gifts with which Mother Nature
had endowed him, was called into play. With this work German
comic opera took its beginning. As has been remarked "although it
has been imitated, it has never been surpassed in its musically
comic effects." The delightfully Falstaffian figure of Osmin,
most ingeniously characterized in the music, will create