"Who is she, that she will not kiss me? Have I not been kissed
by the queen?" In London his improvisations and piano sonatas excited
the greatest admiration. Here he also published his third work. These
journeys were an uninterrupted chain of triumphs for the child-virtuoso
on the piano, organ, violin, and in singing. He was made honorary member
of the Academies of Bologna and Verona, decorated with orders,
and received at the age of thirteen an order to write the opera of
"Mithridates," which was successfully produced at Milan in 1770. Several
other fine minor compositions were also written to order at this time
for his Italian admirers. At Rome Mozart attended the Sistine Chapel
and wrote the score of Allegri's great mass, forbidden by the pope to be
copied, from the memory of a single performance.

The record of Mozart's youthful triumphs might be extended at great
length; but aside from the proof they furnish of his extraordinary
precocity, they have lent little vital significance in the great problem
of his career, except so far as they stimulated the marvelous boy to lay
a deep foundation for his greater future, which, short as it was, was
fruitful in undying results.

II.

Mozart's life in Paris, where he lived with his mother in 1778 and
1779, was a disappointment, for he despised the French nation. His deep,
simple, German nature revolted from Parisian frivolity, in which he
found only sensuality and coarseness, disguised under a thin veneering
of social grace. He abhorred French music in these bitter terms: "The
French are and always will be downright donkeys. They cannot sing, they
scream." It was just at this time that Gluck and Piccini were having
their great art-duel. We get a glimpse of the pious tendency of the
young composer in his characterization of Voltaire: "The ungodly
arch-villain, Voltaire, has just died like a dog." Again he writes:
"Friends who have no religion cannot long be my friends.... I have such
a sense of religion that I shall never do anything that I would not do
before the whole world."

With Mozart's return to Germany in 1779, being then twenty-three years
of age, comes the dawn of his classical period as a composer. The
greater number of his masses had already been written, and now he
settled himself in serious earnest to the cultivation of a true German
operatic school. This found its dawn in the production of "Idomeneo,"
his first really great work for the lyric stage.

Th