greatest
musicians, and he gave a splendid and permanent demonstration of his
theory. Through all his vicarious ambition he kept his son's love and
kept it almost to the point of idolatry. Indeed the boy once wrote,
"Next to God comes papa."

The domestic relations of the family were indeed as happy as they well
could be. Mozart's letters to his sister, Maria Anna, who was nicknamed
"Nannerl," are brimful of cheerful affection and of sprightly interest
in her own love affairs. His relations with his mother and father were
full, not only of filial piety, but of that far better proof of real
affection, a playful humour.

Mozart's mother died in Paris when her son and she were there alone
together. He wrote the news of her death to a friend of his father's and
bade him tell the father only that she was seriously ill but would
probably recover, and gradually to prepare him for the worst. This
letter he wrote at two o'clock in the morning; the same night he wrote
his father a long letter full of news, incidentally saying that his
mother was very ill, but that he hoped for the best, and that, in any
case, resignation to the will of God was imperative. A few days later he
wrote another letter telling the bitter truth, and telling it with most
devout concern for his father's health and reconciliation with the
divine dispensation. In this letter he seems rather the father to his
own father than the young gallant of twenty-two. It was a good heart the
boy had.

Mozart had been so much caressed and flattered by court beauties as a
child that he was precocious in flirtation. His sister was the
confidante and messenger of all sorts of boyish amours. There is a fine
mysteriousness in the letters he wrote his mother while he was making a
musical conquest of Milan like a veteran musician, and betraying his
fourteen-year-old boyishness only in such phrases as this: "I kiss
your hand a thousand times, and have a great deal to say to my sister;
but what? That is known only to God and myself. Please God I hope soon
to be able to confide it to her verbally."

This does not sound like the writing of a composer who was adding in a
letter a few days later, "Pray to God that my opera may be successful."
The opera was successful, and the Pope gave him a knighthood; and he was
only fourteen years old!

Perhaps this mysterious sweetheart is the same one he alludes to later
as Annamindl, and concerning whom he sends his sister such solemn
m