“worthy of being produced before the greatest monarch at the greatest festivities.” And how frequently this very thing has happened since! But the people continue Mozart’s real sovereign, the people in the most ingenuous innocence of their every impulse and emotion and of the most ideal view of life’s ultimate nature. And Mozart belongs to the people. To them, he is not dead. But the hour of our parting ourselves with this phenomenal artist and phenomenal man will soon strike. He now worked uninterruptedly on his _Requiem_, and the theatre was left to a younger _Capellmeister_. He frequently wrote until two o’clock in the morning. He even refused to give lessons in music to a lady for a very dear Vienna friend. He had, he said, a piece of work in hand which was very urgent and which he had very much at heart; and, until it was finished, he could do nothing else. Even while engaged on the last pieces of the _Magic Flute_, such as the march and the chorus, “O Isis and Osiris,” he sometimes sank exhausted in his chair, and had short fits of fainting; for his whole heart and soul were wrapped up in his work. But he cared less than ever now about physical exhaustion, since he was directly concerned with the erection of a worthy monument to his sentiment and feeling of the Eternal in the holy sanctuary itself. He had an earnest feeling of the terror of guilt, even if the feeling seemed to him no more than a weakness. But he felt also, and infinitely more deeply, the power of forgiving love which was the life of his own soul. That mighty mediæval, Christian poem, the _Dies irae_, inspired and stimulated his fancy. He wished to show the world its own painfully tragic meaning and its blessed reconciliation. Certain it is that no composer ever went to work with a more honest intention to give a true artistic form to religious expression in the mass for the dead. True, it is only certain parts that are in complete keeping with this deep, religious feeling; while his secular compositions are throughout appropriate to the subject treated. The explanation of this difference is the fact, that Mozart was too long and too exclusively engaged in writing operatic music, and that the operatic character had, as we have already seen, crept into the music which was now in favor in the service of the Catholic Church. But these parts, especially the thrilling accords descriptive of man’s consciousness of guilt, the _Gedenke gnaedig meines Endes_, and the close of the _Confutatis_, the touching prayer for loving mercy in the _Lacrimosa_--these parts were in entire harmony with the religious feeling of their author and with his unsurpassed artistic power. And this it was that made the work so very dear to himself. It was his favorite, his dying song. Art had subsequently to take another and very different direction in this department of music, but the language of the heart overflowing with the feelings of its God and of the purest confidence in his undying love,