helped to fix more firmly the distinctive character of monophonic composition. After Haydn was born, and before he died, Mozart lived. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born at Salzburg, Jan. 27, 1756. He received his early tuition from his father, an excellent musician, and speedily developed into a "wonder child." He made several tours through Europe as a pianist, but finally settled in Vienna, where he married and spent the remainder of his brief life in pouring out operas, quartets, songs, sonatas, and other compositions, some of which were certainly made to sell, but all of which display something of his marvellous genius. It cannot fairly be said of Mozart that he contributed a great deal that was new to the mere technics of sonata writing. Mozart had little of the spirit of the explorer, and less of that of the reformer. He was content to take musical forms as he found them and instil into them a vitality which was inseparable from serious attempts at composition. Some of his works, indeed, show the evil results of that fatal facility which is a menace to art; but nearly all of them display a fecundity of invention, a grace and freedom of style, and a sense of artistic elegance which did much to influence subsequent writers. Mozart's piano sonatas are worthy of the pianist's attention, but they cannot be said to have done anything toward the advancement of the form which Haydn's did not. Mozart learned the sonata form from Haydn's works. He gave something back to his teacher, but it was chiefly in the shape of suggestions as to instrumental treatment, for Mozart was a master pianist, and Haydn was only a respectable performer. Mozart's sonatas show wonderful cleverness in adapting to the idiom of the piano the vocal style of the contemporaneous Italian opera, of which Mozart was the finest composer. His C minor sonata, written in 1784, is his greatest piano work. It is so fine that, except for the comparative baldness of its instrumental style, it ranks with the works of Beethoven's middle period.