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<blockquote>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 finished and complete 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... When I proceed to write down my ideas, I take out of the bag of my memory, if I may use that phrase, what has previously been collected into it, in the way I have mentioned. For this reason, the committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is, as I said before, already finished; and it rarely differs on paper from what it was in my imagination.</blockquote>
The contents of the Rochlitz letter were relayed by such authorities as the mathematician [[Henri Poincaré]] and the musician [[Albert Lavignac]]<ref>Albert Lavignac, ''L'éducation musicale'', p. 290</ref> and had a great influence on the popular view of Mozart's compositional process. And as late as 1952 a volume of collected papers from a symposium on the creative process
But although it has been influential in historical conceptions of Mozart, the letter has more recently not been regarded as an accurate description of Mozart's compositional process.<ref>Konrad, 101</ref> On the other hand, there is still no reason to suppose that even if Rochlitz did forge the letter, he would have wanted to misrepresent what he knew of Mozart's actual compositional practice any more than he would have wanted to misrepresent his handwriting. Moreover, in direct support of Rochlitz's account, Mozart's first biographer, in collaboration with Mozart's wife, related a congruent description of how Mozart composed:
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