The music of Mozart, as one hears it in "Die Zauberflöte," is music without desire, music content with beauty, and to be itself. It has the firm outlines of Dürer or of Botticelli, with the same constraint within a fixed form, if one compares it with the Titian-like freedom and splendour of Wagner. In hearing Mozart I saw Botticelli's "Spring"; in hearing Wagner I had seen the Titian "Scourging of Christ." Mozart has what Coventry Patmore called "a glittering peace": to Patmore that quality distinguished supreme art, and, indeed, the art of Mozart is, in its kind, supreme. It has an adorable purity of form, and it has no need to look outside those limits which it has found or fixed for itself. Mozart cares little, as a rule, for what he has to express; but he cares infinitely for the way in which he expresses everything, and, through the mere emotional power of the notes themselves, he conveys to us all that he cares to convey: awe, for instance, in those solemn scenes of the priests of Isis. He is a magician, who plays with his magic, and can be gay, out of mere pleasant idleness, fooling with Papagenus as Shakespeare fools in "Twelfth-Night." "Die Zauberflöte" is really a very fine kind of pantomime, to which music lends itself in the spirit of the thing, yet without condescending to be grotesque. The duet of Papagenus and Papagena is absolutely comic, but it is as lovely as a duet of two birds, of less flaming feather. As the lovers ascend through fires and floods, only the piping of the magic flute is heard in the orchestra: imagine Wagner threading it into the web of a great orchestral pattern! For Mozart it was enough, and for his art, it was enough. He gives you harmony which does not need to mean anything outside itself, in order to be supremely beautiful; and he gives you beauty with a certain exquisite formality, not caring to go beyond the lines which contain that reticent, sufficient charm of the Mirabell-Garten. NOTES ON WAGNER AT BAYREUTH I. BAYREUTH AND MUNICH