Lange, his brother-in-law, observed that “when he was engaged on his most important works he took more than his usual share in any light or jesting talk that was going on.” When his wife was confined of her first child he was working on the second of the quartets dedicated to Haydn; he brought his table to her room, and frequently rose to cheer or comfort her in her pain, without apparently interrupting his train of thought. On the evening before the day set for the first performance of “Don Giovanni,” the overture was still unwritten, though Mozart doubtless had it perfectly clear in his mind. He sat up most of the night copying it out, his wife meantime plying him with punch and with stories to keep him awake; and by seven in the morning it was complete. When he sends his sister a prelude and fugue he apologizes for the prelude being copied after the fugue instead of before it. “The reason was,” he adds, “that I had already composed the fugue, and wrote it down while I was thinking out the prelude.” It is necessary to bear constantly in mind this independence, activity, and self-sufficiency of Mozart’s musical thought-processes, if we would at all understand the paradox of his personality. Mozart the man, and Mozart the musician, were two beings. The man, when all is said, and in spite of many endearing traits, was disappointingly commonplace. Although he was a good linguist, and fond, as a boy, of mathematics, he was intellectually undistinguished. His letters are rather conventional, he kept no journal, he read little, and though he said a sharp or clever thing now and then his conversation was not remarkable. Emotionally he was also not unusual. Amiable, generous, and honorable, he was rather lacking in will-power, rather immature and unformed.