Once more his thoughts were turned to Salzburg, for two of the leading musicians there having died, the Archbishop Hieronymus offered their posts to the Mozarts, father and son, at a salary of a thousand florins for the two. The father anxiously entreated his son to return and accept this offer, mentioning as a further bait, that Aloysia Weber would probably be engaged to sing in Salzburg. Much as Wolfgang hated Salzburg, or rather the people living there, his love for his father and sister prevailed over his aversion; and though with no pleasure at all in the prospect of seeing the hateful archbishop again, he set out from Paris, travelling to Salzburg in very leisurely fashion via Strasbourg, Mannheim, and Munich. At Strasbourg he was induced to give several concerts, but they were not pecuniary successes, and he did not make by any one more than three louis d'or. But how the artist peeps out in every line of the letters in which he describes these! After saying how few were present, and how cold it was, he proceeds: "But I soon warmed myself, to show the Strasbourg gentlemen how little I cared, and played to them a long time for my own amusement, giving a concerto more than I had promised, and at the close extemporizing. It is now over, but at all events I gained honor and fame." At Munich a great shock awaited him. He visited the Webers, and being in mourning for his mother, wore, after the French fashion, a red coat with black buttons. When he appeared, Aloysia hardly seemed to recognize him, and her coldness was so marked, that Mozart quietly seated himself at the piano, and sang in a loud voice, "Ich lass das Mädchen gern das mich nicht will" (I gladly give up the girl who slights me). It was all over, and he had to bear the loss of the fickle girl as best he might. There is a significant line in one of his letters at this time to his father: "In my whole life I never wrote worse than I do to-day, but I really am unfit for anything; my heart is so full of tears." After two years' absence he returned home to Salzburg, where he was warmly welcomed back. Here he remained for a little while, and wrote his first serious opera, "Idomeneo," to the text of an Abbe Varesco, a Salzburger. This opera Beethoven thought the finest of all that Mozart wrote. It was brought out at Munich in January, 1781, and was brilliantly successful. In the March following, an order was received from the archbishop to follow him to Vienna, where he wished to appear with all the full pomp and brilliant retinue of a prince of the church; and as one of this retinue Mozart had to follow him, little thinking at the time that he should never return to Salzburg, but that Vienna henceforth was to be his home.