The extraordinary training and the wise guidance of the father, a highly educated musician, broad-minded and progressive, were the second great advantage accruing to Mozart, whose genius was thus led from the beginning into proper channels. Leopold Mozart, himself under the influence of the Mannheim school, naturally imparted to his son all the peculiarities of their style. Through him also the influence of Emanuel Bach became an early source of inspiration. Pure, simple melody with a natural obvious harmonic foundation was the musical ideal to which Mozart aspired from the first. Nevertheless, the study of counterpoint was never neglected in the training which his father gave him, though it was not until later, under the instruction of Padre Martini, that he came to appreciate its full significance and elevated beauty. With Mozart the musical supremacy of Germany, first asserted by the instrumental composers of Mannheim and Berlin, is confirmed and extended to the field of vocal music and the opera. Mozart could accomplish this task only by virtue of his broad cosmopolitanism, which, like that of Gluck, enabled him to gather up in his grasp the achievements of the most diverse schools. To this cosmopolitanism he was predisposed by the circumstances of his birth as well as of his early life. The geographical position of Salzburg, where he was born in 1756, was, in a sense, a strategic one. Situated in the southernmost part of Germany, it was exposed to the influence of Italian taste; inhabited by a sturdy German peasantry and bourgeoisie, its sympathies were on the side of German art, and the musicians at court were, at the time of Mozart’s birth, almost without exception Germans. Yet the echoes of the cultural life not only of Vienna, Munich, and Mannheim, but of Milan, Naples, and Paris, reached the narrow confines of this mountain fastness, this citadel of intolerant Catholicism.