Leopold Mozart might be his son’s chief devotee, but craving to have him in Salzburg to love and manipulate, coupled with the timidity of a once venturesome musician who had come to think of a quarter-loaf better than none, overrode his awareness of Mozart’s greatness. In mid-September 1778, as he delayed his return from Paris, Mozart beseeched his father to understand: “The only thing – I tell you this straight from the heart – that disgusts me in Salzburg is that one can’t have any proper social intercourse with those people – and that the music does not have a better reputation – and – that the archbishop does not believe clever people who have traveled,” that is, clever people like himself. “For, I assure you, without travel at least for people from the arts and sciences, one is a miserable creature! – and I assure you that if the archbishop does not permit me to take a trip every two years, I cannot possible accept any engagement. A man of mediocre talents always remains mediocre, may he travel or not – but a man of superior talents, which I cannot deny myself to have without being blasphemous, becomes – bad, if he always stays in the same place. If the archbishop would trust me, I would soon make his music famous; that is surely true.” And it was surely true.
Mozart. Peter Gay. Viking, 1999. p.55
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