as I have been a witness, despite the wretchedness of their
librettos? Because in them music rules and compels us to forget
everything else. All the more must an opera please in which the
plot is well carried out, and the words are written simply for
the sake of the music and not here and there to please some
miserable rhyme, which, God knows, adds nothing to a theatrical
representation but more often harms it. Verses are the most
indispensable thing in music, but rhymes, for the sake of rhymes,
the most injurious. Those who go to work so pedantically will
assuredly come to grief along with the music. It were best if a
good composer, who understands the stage, and is himself able to
suggest something, and a clever poet could be united in one, like
a phoenix. Again, one must not fear the applause of the
unknowing."

(Vienna, October 13, 1781, to his father. The utterance is
notable as showing Mozart's belief touching the relationship
between text and music; he places himself in opposition to Gluck
whose ideas were at a later day accepted by Wagner. ["It was my
intention to confine music to its true dramatic province, of
assisting poetical expression, and of augmenting the interest of
the fable, without interrupting the action, or chilling it with
useless and superfluous ornaments; for the office of music, when
joined to poetry, seemed to me to resemble that of coloring in a
correct and well disposed design, where the lights and shades
only seem to animate the figures without altering the outline."
Gluck in his dedication of "Alceste" to the Grand Duke of
Tuscany. "The error in the genre of opera consists herein, that a
means of expression (music) has been made the end, while the end
of expression (the drama) has been made a means." Wagner, "Opera