It is unquestionable that Mozart, excited by the melodrama, has set himself eagerly to express dramatic details in music, and yet in almost every case the exigencies of musical construction have been too much for him. The impressions he has received from the drama become only impulses, leading him to accent more sharply and set in stronger contrast the various points of his composition; the special points of the dramatic situations are not fully brought out in the music. This is in great measure the fault of the play, which affords few powerful or effective suggestions to the composer either through its characters or its situations; {COURT SERVICE IN SALZBURG.} (110) great poetical or dramatic power would no doubt have called forth other music. That such a play should have been received with interest and applause,[23] that it should have incited Mozart to composition, is a speaking proof of the taste of the time. Shakespeare and Goethe had not yet penetrated the intellectual atmosphere in which Mozart had grown up; before poetry could assert its sway in the province of music it had to express and realise the demand for a characterisation bringing to view the most individual traits of human character. Gebler had sought to invest his drama with peculiar dignity by providing it with choruses, for which Racine's "Athalie" may have furnished him with an example. The play begins with a solemn sacrifice in the Temple of the Sun, the priests and virgins singing hymns to the Godhead; in the same way, at the beginning of the fifth act, the coronation of the king is introduced by a sacrifice, the priests and virgins again singing a hymn.[24] These choruses gave Mozart opportunity for a magnificent style of composition, with all the brilliancy that external support could give. The hymns were well-known ones with Latin words inserted later, for which, however, a German translation was again substituted. Our judgment as to style and conception {CHORUSES TO KONIG THAMOS.} (111)