The clarinet has a very beautiful and versatile sound, which is perfect for romantic melodies or very sharp textures and can play in extremely loud or quite soft. One of the newer orchestral instruments – it was crucial to the sound of early jazz music and the Swing Era. Mozart wrote to Stadler: “Never would I have thought that a clarinet could be capable of imitating the human voice as deceptively as it is imitated by you. Truly your instrument has so soft and lovely a tone that nobody with a heart could resist it.”