It would be a great mistake to suppose that Mozart, at this time, was completely entangled in the meshes of love. He did not forget his high vocation, and even in this affair of the heart, his art had no small influence. He writes to his father: “My dear miss Weber has done herself and me credit beyond expression, by this aria. All said that they were never moved by an aria as they were by that one. But then she sang it as it should be sung.” And yet she “had learned the aria by herself,” and sang it “in accordance with her own taste.” How well that taste must have been already cultivated, and what a good teacher the young composer must have been! But does not Platen sing: “Mein Herz und deine Stimme Verstehn sich gar zu gut!”[3] Aloysia, in later years, contributed more than any other vocalist to make the world acquainted with Mozart’s music and to teach people to understand it. And this was necessary. For, even Mozart’s melodies, which seem to us now so easily and so universally intelligible, found it, in their own day, and this not unfrequently, no easy matter to hold their own; and it was only very gradually that they were given the preference over the incomparably more languid melodies of the time, especially over the florid style of the Italians. Even now, he had in this successful effort, the hoped-for opera in Mannheim, mainly in view; which would thus and through his own efforts have a _prima donna_ as well as a first tenor. But even here his hopes were destined to disappointment. We cannot now enter into details, but must refer the reader to Mozart’s letters to his father. They afford us a true picture of the culture, musical and other, of a small German court of that period, which had a very decisive influence on German art. From these letters we learn, first of all, that the real object of his visit was kept steadily in view. They tell us of his plans, and give us detailed accounts of his industry in his art, with here and there an outburst of the unknown feeling that animated him. Mozart, who was so fond of doing nothing but “speculating and studying”: that is, who loved to live only for art and in art, diligently endeavors to find scholars to instruct and tasks in composition of every description, even for the flute, for which he had so little liking. He has still a firm faith in the intention of the elector to charge him with the composition of at least one German opera. He had heard an opera of that kind--“Guenther von Schwarzburg,” by Holzbauer--here in Mannheim, and what would he not have been able himself to produce with artists like Raaff, his own Weber, and the celebrated Mesdames Wendling, under the leadership of a Cannabich! At all events he here learned what might be expected of a good orchestra, just as he had previously learned in Italy how to write for song.