“Dearest, best, lovingest, fairest, enticingest, by-an-unworthy-cousin-to-harness-broken.”

With her name he puns on Baesle and Bass, thence, “Baeschen oder Violoncellchen”—­a little bass-viol or violoncelline.  He writes, as he says, to appease her “alluring beauty (visibilia et invisibilia) heightened by wrath to the height of your slipper-heel.”  Then he writes her a passionate parody on a poem of Klopstock’s, and writes it in circular form around his own sketch of her portrait, which implies neither beauty on her part nor art on his.

This is the last letter he seems ever to have written her excepting a business letter two years later.  And this marks the end of a flirtation which he seems to have regarded as sheer frivolity.  But this was not her mood.  Biographer Jahn says: 

“The Baesle seems to have taken her cousin’s courtship seriously; at least all the neighbours thought from the way she spoke of him that there was something of deluded expectation in her tone.  She spoke neither gladly nor often of this time.  She was not musical and could not have had a proper appreciation of Mozart’s artistic value.  His vivacity and velocity of musical performance seemed comical to her.  Of her later life nothing is known to me; she lived later with the Postmaster Streite in Bayreuth and died there Jan. 25, 1841, at the great age of eighty-three.”

So much for the Baesle.  Poor girl!  But while the hollyhock was taking the bee’s fickleness so solemnly, a rose was revenging her upon him.  A more serious—­for Mozart a very serious—­affair, was his infatuation with Aloysia Weber, a fifteen-year-old girl with much beauty and little heart.

When Mozart was in Manheim in 1778, writing flowery letters to the Baesle, he had occasion to have certain music copied, to be sung before the Princess of Orange, who had become interested in his work.  The copyist was also a prompter in the theatre and a very poor, but hospitable man.  His name was Weber, and his brother became the father of Carl Maria von Weber, the composer.

The fact that Weber was poor was the first recommendation to Mozart.  Another magnet was, that Weber had a daughter fifteen years old who was gifted with a voice and seemed capable of a great artistic career.  It was this vicarious ambition that had interested him in the young singer Keiserin some years before.  And now we find him writing to his father on Jan. 17, 1778, the following description of the Weber family: 

“He has a daughter who sings admirably, and has a lovely pure voice; she is only fifteen.  She fails in nothing but in stage action; were it not for that, she might be the prima donna of any theatre.  Her father is a downright honest German who brings up his children well, for which very reason the girl is persecuted here.  He has six children,—­five girls and a son.  He and his wife and children have been obliged to live for the last fourteen years on an income of 200 florins, but as he has already done his duty well, and has lately provided a very accomplished singer for the Elector, he has now actually 400 florins.  My aria for De’ Amicis she sings to perfection with all its tremendous passages.”