intrepido!" could not be expressed by the music. In the terzet (24) Nardo, in order to escape the importunities of the crazy pair, points towards heaven, and tells them with increasing animation how the sun and moon quarrel, and the stars engage in love adventures; when he has set the pair gazing fixedly upwards, he makes off. Broadly represented, this gay, lively terzet must have made an effect, but it would have been equally comic had Nardo fixed their attention on anything else, since the effect depends on the vivacity and humour with which the composer grasps the situation, and withdraws the attention of the audience from the nonsense which the poet has put into the mouths of the characters. But even this was impossible in the accompanied recitative during which Belfiore loses his senses before the eyes of the {"LA FINTA GIARDINIERA"--BUFFO PARTS.} (219) audience (19). At first, when he is beset by contending emotions, music is in its place; when he believes himself to be dead and in Elysium, Mozart has certainly constructed a characteristic, well-rounded movement, but a specific expression of the illusion it is not and cannot be. The song in which, restored to his senses, he expresses his joy at still living (in tempo di minuetto) is lively, and appeals to the senses like dance music, but after what has gone before it makes no comic impression. The first bar of this--[See Page Image] reminds us, as Sonnleithner has remarked, both of the minuet and trio of the Symphony in D major (385 K.), and of a couple of bars in the first allegro of the Symphony in E flat major (543 K.). The Podestà is a genuine buffo, proud, amorous, consequential in virtue of his office, easily excited, easily perplexed, but good-natured at bottom; the genuine type of a comic old man; there was probably a personal reason for making this character tenor instead of bass, though the course was not an unusual one.[24] The musical conception of the character is that of the traditional buffo. The first air (3) depicts, according to a fashion of the time, different instruments which are heard in the orchestra in a concerted accompaniment. This song has nothing in common with the situation or with the character of the Podestà, and is an interpolation for the German version. The Italian text contains a song for Sandrina, "Dentro il mio petto io sento," which Mozart composed, as we learn from a letter of his father's (December 2, 1780), who had it copied for Schikaneder. The other two songs (17, 25) are genuine buffo--lively, rapidly uttered--a continual struggle between false dignity, anger, vexation, and perplexity. The servants are also, according to custom, comic {OPERA BUFFA.} (220)