“I have been in Italy three times. I have written three operas, am a member of the Academy of Bologna, and have been obliged to undergo an examination on which many a master has been obliged to work and to sweat over for four or five hours. I got through it in an hour. This may prove to your highness that I am able to be of service at any court. My only wish is to serve your electoral highness, who is himself a great....” “Yes, my dear child, but I am sorry to say that there is not a place vacant. If there was only a vacancy.” “I assure your highness that I would certainly do honor to Munich.” “Well, it’s of no use to talk that way, there’s not a place vacant.” We have here given the whole dialogue. It is a typical example of the way in which princes and magnates treated Mozart through the whole of his short life. There never was “a vacancy” for him. Real genius finds no place to lay its head. It would seem as if its god-given nature were fated to find nothing earthly to cling to. But, to continue. Spite of this positive declaration, Mozart was not deterred from trying it again at court, and this spite of the fact that his father had written to him that the elector could not create a new place without any more ado, and that, besides, there were always secret enemies in such cases, who prevented a thing of that kind out of anxiety to save their own skin. Yet friends, true and false, found means to flatter him. First of all, there was count Seeau, who had a pecuniary interest in the theater, and understood what advantage a fertile mind like that of Mozart might be to him. He knew how to amuse Mozart, whom, on the occasion of the performance of his first opera, he saw to be all fire and flame, with fair hopes: Mozart was to write a German opera of the heroic kind, and this appealed powerfully to his patriotic feelings. He himself next stirred up his own friends. A number of those interested in him, it was proposed, should club together, and enable him, by a regular monthly contribution, to remain in Munich until he had written such a work, and thus obtained a foothold. Seeau had, indeed, expressed himself to the effect that he would like to retain Mozart, if he had only “a little assistance from home.” Mozart wanted to pledge himself to write four German operas a year, partly comic and partly serious, and estimated that his profits from them would be at least eight hundred and fifty marks, or about two hundred dollars; that count Seeau would give at least five hundred, and would be always invited--and how much there was to be gained here! And he adds: “I am very much liked here even now; but how popular I should be if I could only elevate the German opera! and this I certainly would be able to do, for I felt the greatest desire to write when I heard the German vaudeville.”