p. 204), requested Dittersdorf in 1786 to draw a parallel between Haydn's and Mozart's chamber music. Dittersdorf answered by requesting the Emperor in his turn to draw a parallel between Klopstock and Gellert; whereupon Joseph replied that both were great poets, but that Klopstock must be read repeatedly in order to understand his beauties, whereas Gellert's beauties lay plainly exposed to the first glance. Dittersdorf's analogy of Mozart with Klopstock, Haydn with Gellert (!), was readily accepted by the Emperor, who further compared Mozart's compositions to a snuffbox of Parisian manufacture, Haydn's to one manufactured in London.[4] The Emperor looked at nothing deeper than the respective degrees of taste displayed by the two musicians, and could find no better comparison for works of art than articles of passing fancy; whereas the composer had regard to the inner essence of the works, and placed them on the same footing as those of the (in his opinion) greatest poets of Germany. However odd may appear to us--admiring as we do, above all things in Mozart, his clearness and purity of form--Dittersdorf s comparison of him with Klopstock, it is nevertheless instructive, as showing that his contemporaries prized his grandeur and dignity, and the force and boldness of his expression, as his highest and most distinguishing qualities. L. Mozart used also to say, that his son was in music what Klopstock was in poetry;[5] no doubt because Klopstock was to him the type of all that was deep and grand. But the public did not regard the new phenomenon in the same light; the quality they esteemed most highly in Haydn's quartets was their animated cheerfulness; and his successors, Dittersdorf, Pichl, Pleyel, had accustomed them even to lighter enjoyments. "It is a pity," says a favourable critic, in a letter from Vienna (January, 1787), "that in his truly artistic and beautiful compositions Mozart should carry his effort after originality too far, to the detriment of the sentiment and heart of his works. His new quartets, dedicated to Haydn, are much too highly spiced to be palatable for any length {MOZART'S instrumental music.} (4) of time."[6] Prince Grassalcovicz, a musical connoisseur of rank in Vienna,[7] had the quartets performed, as Mozart's widow relates,[8] and was so enraged at finding that the discords played by the musicians were really in the parts, that he tore them all to pieces--but Gyrowetz's symphonies pleased him very much. From Italy also the parts were sent back to the publisher, as being full of printer's errors, and even Sarti undertook to prove, in a violent criticism, that some of the music in these quartets was insupportable from its wilful offences against rule and euphony. The chief stumbling-block is the well-known introduction of the C major quartet--[See Page Image]