True, Mozart reaches neither the depths nor the heights of Beethoven; his range is not so wide. And since in life, too, he remained a careless child to the end of his days, his music does not have that subjectively tragic quality which is expressed so powerfully in Beethoven. But this did not prevent him from creating an objectively tragic type, the most superb and wonderful human presentation ever depicted in music. I mean Donna Anna in Don Giovanni. Oh, how difficult is to make anyone see and feel in music what we see and feel ourselves! I am quite incapable of describing to you what I felt on hearing Don Giovanni, especially the scene where the noble figure of the beautiful, proud, revengeful woman appears on the stage. Nothing in any opera has ever impressed me so deeply. Afterwards, when Donna Anna recognizes in Don Giovanni the man who has wounded her pride and killed her father, and her anger bursts out like a rushing torrent in that magnificent recitative, and that aria later on, when every note of the orchestra seems to speak of her wrath and pride and actually quiver with horror – I could cry out and weep from the overpowering strain on the emotions. And her lament over her father’s body, the duet with Don Ottavio where she swears vengeance, her arioso in the great sextet in the churchyard – these are incomparable, superb, operatic scenes! / I love the music of Don Giovanni so much that even as I write you, I could shed tears of agitation and emotion. << less