It has pleased some hitherto unknown person in Vienna to take in hand my opera, "Belmont und Constanze," or "Die Entführung aus dem Serail," and to publish the piece in a very altered form. The alterations in the dialogue are not considerable, and may be passed over; but the adapter has inserted a vast number of songs, the words of which are in many cases edifying and touching in the highest possible degree. I would not willingly deprive the improver of the glory belonging to his work, and I therefore take this opportunity of specifying these inserted songs as belonging to the Vienna edition and Mozart's composition. In conclusion, and after giving "a specimen of the improver's work from the quartet," Bretzner exclaims: "And this is called improvement!" Nevertheless the text was improved, and although far from first-rate, it had been rendered a fairly satisfactory and practicable libretto, which has not yet been very far surpassed in the literature of German comic opera. The plot is certainly not thrilling, but it {THE "ENTFÜHRUNG," A GERMAN OPERA.} (231) allows the natural development of a succession of musical situations. It was, as we have seen, Mozart's merit to recognise these in his musical representation, to make them available in such a way as to distinguish the "Entführung" from all earlier vaudevilles and operettas. Mozart's performance was not confined to the adoption of certain ready-developed forms of Italian opera, pressed into the service of the German opera, partly from necessity, partly from the narrow principle that the songs were to be sung by personages of supposed high position.[43] This would have been no sufficient reason for substituting the aria for the Lied; it was done to give full scope to musical construction, and to make the standard and measure of the execution to consist only in the artistic conditions of the dramatic situations, and in the nature of the musical expression.[44] At home as he was in Italian, French and German opera, in sacred and instrumental music, he had obtained such a mastery over musical forms as gave him a freedom of action which his favourable circumstances in Vienna allowed him to make use of, and the fact that he was composing a German opera gave him a sense of a still higher freedom. He was German in every thought and feeling, and German music was his natural way of expressing himself as an artist, requiring no unusual form, no special characterisation, nothing but freedom of thought and action. In the "Entführung," German sentiment, emotion, and disposition found expression for the first time at the hands of a true artist. It is easy to understand how the fulness of life and truth in such a work would throw into the shade all who believed solely in those forms which were borrowed from foreign {DIE EXTFÜHRUXG AUS DEM SERAIL.} (232)