Before Mozart had set himself in earnest to this task, he received in the middle of August a fresh commission which brooked of no delay. A festival opera was to be performed at the approaching coronation of Leopold II. as King of Bohemia in Prague. The subject chosen was Metastasio's "Clemenza di Tito," and again it was the people of Prague who made good the deficiencies of the Viennese: the States called upon Mozart to compose the opera. For reasons which do not appear their decision was so long delayed that there remained only a few weeks for the composition and rehearsal {LABOUR AND POVERTY.} (288) of the opera. After making all preliminary arrangements, Mozart set out for Prague. As he was in the act of stepping into the travelling-carriage with his wife, the mysterious messenger appeared, and touching his wife on the arm, asked how it would fare with the Requiem now. Mozart excused himself by alleging the necessity of his present journey, and the impossibility of acquainting his unknown patron with it, and promised that it should be his first work on his return if the delay were granted him; with this the messenger declared himself satisfied. Mozart worked at his opera during the journey, making sketches in the carriage, and working them out at the inn where they stopped for the night. He must have intended the part of Sextus to be taken by a tenor, for in two sketches of the duets with Vitellia (i) and Annius (3) Sextus is a tenor, which of course necessitated a plan and treatment altogether different. He cannot have received definite instructions as to the cast of the opera until he was in Prague; but then he set to work with so much ardour that in the course of eighteen days the opera was finished and in rehearsal.[34] He called in the assistance of a young composer named Franz Süssmayr, one of his pupils, who is said to have written the secco recitatives; what makes this the more probable is the fact that in the original score there is no secco recitative at all. But the further assertion that Süssmayr composed the airs for Servilia, Annius, and Publius, and arranged the instrumentation of some other pieces,[35] is disproved by the existence of almost all the numbers in Mozart's handwriting.[36] {FIRST PERFORMANCE OF "TITUS," 1791.} (289) The opera was performed with great magnificence[37] on September 6, the coronation day, after the banquet, before the royal family and an invited audience, in the National Theatre.[38] The cast was as follows:--[See Page Image]