I Cannot Write In Verse For

This passage comes from a letter Mozart wrote to his father Leopold on 13 October 1781, explaining his compositional philosophy while working on Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio). He was defending his approach to setting text to music, arguing that in opera the music must govern the drama rather than merely illustrate the words — a position he expressed as: "In an opera the poetry must be altogether the obedient daughter of the music." The letter is among the most celebrated documents in the history of music aesthetics, outlining Mozart's belief that music was his native language in a way that poetry, painting, and rhetoric could never be.