t pianoforte player and composer of his
time by all of musical Germany, could suffer such dire extremes of want
as to be obliged more than once to beg for a dinner. In 1791 he composed
the score of the "Magic Flute" at the request of Schikaneder, a Viennese
manager, who had written the text from a fairy tale, the fantastic
elements of which are peculiarly German in their humor. Mozart put
great earnestness into the work, and made it the first German opera of
commanding merit, which embodied the essential intellectual sentiment
and kindly warmth of popular German life. The manager paid the composer
but a trifle for a work whose transcendent success enabled him to build
a new opera-house and laid the foundation of a large fortune. We are
told, too, that at the time of Mozart's death in extreme want, when his
sick wife, half maddened with grief, could not buy a coffin for the dead
composer, this hard-hearted wretch, who owed his all to the genius of
the great departed, rushed about through Vienna bewailing the loss to
music with sentimental tears, but did not give the heart-broken widow
one kreutzer to pay the expense of a decent burial.

In 1791 Mozart's health was breaking down with great rapidity, though
he himself would never recognize his own swiftly advancing fate. He
experienced, however, a deep melancholy which nothing could remove. For
the first time his habitual cheerfulness deserted him. His wife had been
enabled through the kindness of her friends to visit the healing waters
of Baden, and was absent.

An incident now occurred which impressed Mozart with an ominous chill.
One night there came a stranger, singularly dressed in gray, with an
order for a requiem to be composed without fail within a month. The
visitor, without revealing his name, departed in mysterious gloom, as
he came. Again the stranger called and solemnly reminded Mozart of his
promise. The composer easily persuaded himself that this was a visitor
from the other world, and that the requiem would be his own; for he
was exhausted with labor and sickness, and easily became the prey of
superstitious fancies. When his wife returned, she found him with a
fatal pallor on his face, silent and melancholy, laboring with intense
absorption on the funereal mass. He would sit brooding over the score
till he swooned away in his chair, and only come to consciousness to
bend his waning energies again to their ghastly work. The mysterious
visitor, whom Mozart b