In the intervals of his travels, Mozart had to spend his time in Salzburg, a town almost intolerably uncongenial. It was a dull, provincial place, the butt of innumerable sarcasms. There was a saying: “He who comes to Salzburg becomes in the first year stupid, in the second idiotic, and in the third a true Salzburger;” and Mozart, in whom taste and experience wrought together to make provincialism odious, was never tired of telling of a Salzburgian who complained that he could not judge Paris satisfactorily, “as the houses were too high and shut off the horizon.” “I detest Salzburg and everything that is born in it,” he wrote; “the tone and the manners of the people are utterly insupportable.” Such a place would have been distasteful enough to the gay and highly social temperament of Mozart even had he had no responsibilities there; but it was his position of music-director to the Archbishop of Salzburg, with the dependence it involved, that finally exhausted his patience. Hieronymus, who became Archbishop in 1772, was a man famed for his churlishness and arrogant, bullying ways. He made his poor music-director’s life a burden; he treated him as a hireling, made him eat with the servants, and called him contemptuous names, such as “Fex,” “Lump,” “Lausbube.” Mozart, driven to desperation, finally applied for his discharge. Receiving no attention, he went in person to press the matter, and was then actually thrown from the Archbishop’s ante-room by a petty official. This insult marked the end of his galling relation with his patron. From 1781 until his death he lived in Vienna, picking up a scanty livelihood by teaching and giving concerts. His situation, after this open rupture with the system of patronage which was the only solid dependence of the eighteenth-century composer, was most precarious. The Viennese public was notoriously fickle towards even the most popular pianists and teachers, while the number of educated people who could be depended upon to buy serious compositions was small, and publishers were consequently unable to pay composers so well as they could in Beethoven’s day. To make matters worse, Mozart was careless in money affairs, luxurious in his tastes, and so weakly amiable that he would at any time give a friend his last kreutzer. We cannot, then, be surprised that when Leopold Mozart, who was naturally cautious, conservative, and worldly, heard that his son had taken lodgings with a certain Madame Weber, in Vienna, and fallen in love with her daughter Constanze, he summarily commanded him to break off the affair. Mozart respectfully but firmly refused to deprive Constanze, whose position in the house of her shiftless and half-drunken mother had aroused his pity, of the benefit of his friendship; and as his father had foreseen, this friendship rapidly deepened into love.