I shall bring out my next opera at my own expense, make at least twelve hundred florins in three representations, and then the management may have it for fifty ducats. If not, I shall be paid, and can produce it anywhere. Meanwhile I hope you will never find in me the least trace of any evil intentions. I would fain not be a bad fellow, but I do not want to be a stupid one who lets other people reap the advantage of his labour and study, and gives up his rightful claim to his own works. The father's distrustful prudence prevented his putting the work in hand at once, and such haste was then necessary that no copyist in Salzburg would undertake it; Mozart had no resource but to explain the cause of the delay to the ambassador. But in the end the score was copied in Salzburg. The "Entführung" was performed the following year at Prague with extraordinary success.[60] "I cannot describe the applause and sensation which it excited at Vienna from my own observation," says Niemetschek; "but I was a witness of the enthusiasm with which it was received at Prague by connoisseurs and non-connoisseurs. It made what one had hitherto heard and known appear not to be music at all! Every one was transported--amazed at the novel harmonies, and at the original passages for the wind instruments." It was given at Leipzig in 1783;[61] at Mannheim,[62] Salzburg, and Schwedt in 1784;[63] at Cassel in 1785;[64] at Berlin not until 1788.[65] The applause was great on all occasions, and very soon the smaller stages sought to master the favourite piece. The actor Philipp Hasenhuth used to relate how the theatrical manager {PERFORMANCES OF THE "ENTFÜHRUNG".} (215) Wilhelm, at Baden,[66] in 1783 or 1784, undertook the production of the "Entführung" with a very weak company. At the rehearsal of the quartet there was no tenor-player; Hasenhuth, who had just begun to learn the violin, and hardly knew one string from another, was put down to the tenor. A little man who had come in as a spectator sat down by him, and when he saw the deficiency, seized a viola and they played together. But the little man soon showed his impatience of his stumbling neighbour, and giving vent to his anger more and more plainly as the quartet proceeded, he ended by flinging away the viola, exclaiming, "The man is a veritable donkey!" (Der Herr ist ein wahrer Krautesel!), and running out of the room. The opera, however, was a great success; and the well-satisfied manager gave his company a farewell supper, to which, hearing that Mozart was in Baden, he invited the composer. Hasenhuth was astonished to recognise in him the tenor-player at the rehearsal, but Mozart relieved him from all awkwardness by saying good-humouredly, "I was somewhat impolite when we last met, but I did not know who you were, and the devil himself could not have stood the wrong notes!" The judgment of contemporary critics of the opera was almost unanimously of accord with that of the public.[67]