The first twenty-five years of Mozart’s life were spent largely in professional tours, as a piano virtuoso, with intermittent periods at home in Salzburg devoted to study and composition. Appearing as a boy-prodigy when he was only six years old, before he was twenty-five he had made five extended and uniformly successful tours. He appeared in most of the larger German and Italian cities, as well as in Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris, and London, everywhere giving new proofs of the quickness, elasticity, and certainty of his musical powers. In Paris, when eight years old, he “accompanied a lady in an Italian air without seeing the music, supplying the harmony for the passage which was to follow from that which he had just heard. This could not be done without some mistakes, but when the song was ended he begged the lady to sing it again, played the accompaniment and the melody itself with perfect correctness, and repeated it ten times, altering the character of the accompaniment for each.”[35] “On a melody being dictated to him, he supplied the bass and the parts without using the clavier at all.”[36] In Rome, when fourteen years old, after hearing Allegri’s Miserere sung in the Papal chapel by a nine-part chorus, he went home and copied out from memory the entire work. A few mistakes were corrected after a second hearing. Such feats as this bespeak a mastery of the technique of pure music even more remarkable, and far more important, than his so much talked of skill as a performer on the piano, organ, and violin. Had music not become to him in early youth a natural language, a second mother-tongue, he could never have learned, in his manhood, to manipulate it with such extraordinary freedom, ingenuity, and power.