Great as were Mozart’s achievements in the field of symphonic music, his services to opera were at least as important. Recent critics, such as Kretzschmar,[49] are wont to exalt the dramatic side of his genius above any other. It is certain, at any rate, that his strongest predilection lay in that direction. Already, in 1764, his father writes from London how the eight-year-old composer ‘has his head filled’ with an idea to write a little opera for the young people of Salzburg to perform. After the return home his dramatic imagination makes him personify the parts of his counterpoint exercises as _Il signor d’alto_, _Il marchese tenore_, _Il duco basso_, etc. Time and again he utters ‘his dearest wish’ to write an opera. Once it is ‘rather French than German, and rather Italian than French’; another time ‘not a _buffa_ but a _seria_.’ Curious enough, neither in _seria_ nor in the purely Italian style did he attain his highest level. But his suggestions, and much of his inspiration, came from Italy. In serious opera, Hasse, Jommelli, Paesillo, Majo, Traetto, and even minor men served him for models, and, of course, his friend Christian Bach; and Mozart never rose above their level. Lacking the qualities of a reformer he followed the models as closely as he did in other fields, but here was a form that was not adequate to his genius--too worn out and lifeless. Gluck might have helped him, but he came too late. And so it happened that _Mitridate_ (1770), _Ascanio in Albo_ (a ‘serenata,’ 1771), _Il sogno di Scipione_ and _Lucio Silla_ (1772), _Il rè pastore_ (dramatic cantata, 1775), _Idomeneo_ (1781), and even _La Clemenza di Tito_, written in his very last year, are as dead to-day as the worst of their contemporaries. But with _opera buffa_ it was otherwise. Various influences came into play here: Piccini’s _La buona figluola_ and (though we have no record of Mozart’s hearing it) its glorious ancestor, Pergolesi’s _Serva padrona_; the successes of the _opéra comique_, Duni, Monsigny, Grétry, even Rousseau--all these reëchoed in his imagination. And then the flexibility of the form--the thing was unlimited, capable of infinite expansion. What if it had become trite and silly--a Mozart could turn dross to gold, he could deepen a puddle into a well! This was his great achievement; what Gluck did for the _opera seria_ he did for the _buffa_. He took it into realms beyond the ken of man, where its absurdities became golden dreams, its figures flesh and blood, its buffoonery divine abandon. The serious side of the story, too, became less and less parody and more and more reality, till in _Don Giovanni_ we do not know where the point of gravity lies. He calls it a _dramma giocosa_, but the joke is all too real. Death, even of a profligate, has its sting.