A Fellow Of Mediocre Talent Will

This comes from a letter Mozart wrote to his father Leopold on 11 September 1778, sourced in Georg Knepler's Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 12. A variant translation citing a letter of 8 November 1777 also circulates. Both letters date from Mozart's frustrated search for employment away from Salzburg, during which he traveled through Augsburg, Mannheim, and Paris seeking a court appointment while his father pressed him to return home. The parenthetical — "without impiety I cannot deny that I possess" superior talent — reveals both his genuine confidence and his awareness of how bold the claim sounded.