This story of Mozart’s last ten years is undoubtedly one of the strangest pages of musical biography. The contrast between his external and his internal life is so violent, so startling, that we rub our eyes involuntarily, wondering if the facts as we know them can be true. And indeed we can believe in them only when we assume that his mind was independent of its environment to a degree uncommon even with genius. Mozart seems to have been a dual person, to have lived two lives at once; outwardly hounded by creditors, worn with the most prostrating and debasing anxiety, forgetting his cares only in a dissipation that was as squalid as they, he was all the time pursuing his artistic ideals with the highest success, and with the serenity of complete mastership. In his nature it was not even a step from the ridiculous to the sublime--the two extremes coexisted and interlaced. The case of Mozart is in fact an eloquent human proof of the truth of Schopenhauer’s theory that pure music is a world by itself, parallel with the actual world of ordinary experience but independent of it. The plastic artist works in materials familiar to his ordinary experience; he puts in his pictures or statues the men, women, animals, trees, and other physical objects that he sees about him daily. Not so the musician. He deals with ideas that have no existence outside of his art; and he therefore constantly keeps up in his mind two independent trains of thought, coexistent but unrelated. That Mozart, whose purely musical genius was perhaps the brightest and most complete that ever existed, habitually lived this double mental life, there are many evidences. His sister-in-law described him as follows: “He was always good-humored, but thoughtful even in his best moods, looking one straight in the face, and always speaking with reflection, whether the talk was grave or gay; and yet he seemed always to be carrying on a deeper train of thought. Even when he was washing his hands in the morning, he never stood still, but walked up and down the room humming, and buried in thought. At table he would often twist up a corner of the table-cloth, and rub his upper lip with it, without appearing in the least to know what he was doing, and he sometimes made extraordinary grimaces with his mouth. His hands and feet were in continual motion, and he was always strumming on something--his hat, his watch-fob, the table, the chairs, as if they were the clavier.” Other contemporaries have recorded that he carried on this musical thought while having his hair dressed, while bowling or playing billiards, while talking or joking, and even, wonderful to say, while listening to other music that did not especially interest him. “The greater industry of his later years,” said his wife, “was merely apparent, because he wrote down more. He was always working in his head, his mind was in constant motion, and one may say that he never ceased composing.”