(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.])

27. "In opera, willy-nilly, poetry must be the obedient daughter
of music. Why do Italian operas please everywhere, even in Paris,