The court had heard him in the very first week of his stay in Mannheim. “You play incomparably well,” said the elector to him. Shortly after Mozart spoke to the elector as “his good friend,” and the latter began: “I have heard that you wrote an opera in Munich.” “Yes, your highness,” Mozart replied, “I commend myself as your grace’s obedient servant. My highest wish is to write an opera I beg your highness not to forget me quite I know German also, and may God be praised and thanked for it.” “That is not at all impossible,” answered his most serene highness, and so Mozart made his arrangements for a longer sojourn in Mannheim. He took some pupils, and as we saw when speaking of the pretty Rosa Cannabich, he wrote sonatas, or variations for them. For this he needed a copyist But copying was, as he once complained to his father, very dear in Mannheim, and he was, therefore, overjoyed, copying being to himself a real torment, after a while--it was at the beginning of 1778--to find a man who performed that task for him, in consideration of his instructing his daughter in music. This man was Fridolin von Weber, brother of the father of C. M. von Weber, and at that time, a prompter and a copyist in the Mannheim theater. The daughter’s name was Aloysia, later the celebrated singer, Madame Lange. The family had seen better days, but the father’s passion for the stage had led him into these straits, where he had for years to support a family of six children on an annual salary of three hundred and fifty marks. But he made such good use of his knowledge of music that his second daughter, who was at this time--she was in her fifteenth year--an excellent singer, cooperated with him at the theater, and thus doubled her father’s salary. Mozart as a musician felt at home in the family--for the eldest daughter, Josepha became afterwards Frau Hofer, for whom the “Queen of the Night” in the _Magic Flute_ was written--and so the sympathy of his good heart was soon awakened. “She needs nothing but action, and then she will make a good prima donna on any stage. Her father is a thoroughly honorable son of our German fatherland. He brings his children up well, and that is the very cause why the girl is persecuted here.” Thus did he sum up the chief points in this affair in the first news he sent home. Subsequently he wrote _a propos_ of a performance at the house of the princess of Orange: “I may pass over her singing with a single word--it was superb!” And at the close of his letter: “I have the inexpressible pleasure to have formed the acquaintance of thoroughly honest and really Christian people. I only regret that I did not know them long ago.”