The meeting of father and son could not fail to be a very touching sight. To form an idea of their feelings on that occasion, one must read the letter written by the father, after he received the news of the mother’s illness. Wolfgang came home immediately, but he came without her, the dearly beloved wife and mother. Every one received him with open arms; but he had already written: “Upon my oath and upon my honor, I say I cannot endure Salzburg or its people; their language and their whole mode of life is unbearable to me;” and the chief cause of his feeling thus lay in his art. He said later: “When I play in Salzburg, or when one of my compositions is produced there, I feel as if only chairs and tables were my listeners.” After this, it is easy to understand why Salzburg was not to his taste. He says: “When one has trifled away his young years in such a beggarly place, in inaction, it is sad enough, and besides, a great loss.” “Baesle’s” merriness helped him to while away the first week of his second stay in his dull native city, in the beginning of 1779. But her simple ways could not now make her what she was to him, when he was less matured in mind and heart. His work was his most agreeable pastime, and, spite of everything, productions of the most varied nature written during his sojourn in Salzburg, afford very abundant proof of this. The symphonies he now wrote were, indeed, greatly excelled by others which he subsequently composed, and the masses eclipsed by his great requiem. But the music to a tragedy, “King Thamos,” has a sound so full and so appeals to the soul, that we feel the presence in it of the greater life-trials he had experienced. And hence it is that Mozart was subsequently able to adapt its choruses to other words, and to introduce them to the world as “hymns.” Their tone reminds us of the solemn, serious choruses of the “Magic Flute,” the drift of which was followed also in the matter of the drama. The composition of these works was due to Schikaneder, of whom we shall have something more to say when speaking of the “Magic Flute.” He was, at this time, director of the theater at Salzburg, and Mozart received an order to write a comic opera for him. This was the “Zaide” and the plot embraced a tale of abduction. Its composition was fast drawing to a close when, at last--it was in the fall of 1780--he saw signs of redemption from his captivity. He received an invitation to compose an opera for Munich. It was the _Idomeneo_, and its success sealed Mozart’s fate for all subsequent time. With the exception of a short visit paid there, he never saw Salzburg again.