in the first violins with sordines and a flute in unison. The _O wie der aengstlich_ was everybody’s favorite aria as well as his own. And yet the rondo _Wenn der Freude Thraenen fliessen_,[8] was still more enrapturing. It contains also that celebrated passage: “Ach Constanze dich zu sehen Dich voll Wonne und Entzuecken An dies treue Herz zu druecken.” in which German music for the first time fully learned the language of manly love and devotion, just as it first had found the musical sublimity of religious feeling in the chorale. Through Belmonte, the character of the “German youth,” was, so to speak, fixed in music for all time. Think only of Beethoven’s _Florestan_, and Wagner’s _Walther von Stolzing_. But the character of the stupid, coarse and wicked master of the Harem, Osmin, thus comically and powerfully drawn, but with all the nobility of style as to its form, was new also. He is no other than the “starched stripling,” the son of a puffed-up Augsburg bourgeois. We have here a picture of the brutal haughtiness of the Salzburg harem, with its model steward of the kitchen. But the vengeance of the artist is noble, and produces an ennobling effect on whole generations. We must read his letters to see how fully he was conscious of the comic even in Osmin’s aria: _Drum beim Barte des Propheten_, and that all folly and excess are their own punishment, and become an object of derision. We find here in this sketch the entire material from which, two generations later, the “Dragon” of the _Niebelungenring_ was built. The heavy rhythm in the very first song, the rudeness of the entire movement, the almost roaring “trallalara”--are the expression of the untamed savagery of brute nature, the grandeur of coarseness in miniature.