Mozart

“When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer—say, traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep, is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.

Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them.
Those ideas that please me I retain in memory, and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself.

If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this or that morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it, that is to say, agreeably to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of the various instruments, etc.


All this fires my soul, and provided I am not disturbed my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once.


What a delight this is I cannot tell! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing lively dream. Still the actual hearing of the tout ensemble is after all the best. What has been thus produced I do not easily forget, and this is perhaps the best gift I have my Divine Maker to thank for."

A Letter, from Life of Mozart, by Edward Holmes.