Mozart's personality and creative drive are interpreted by Esman in terms of his highly ambivalent relationship with his father, a rigid, authoritarian character, who was Mozart's only musical teacher. Much of Mozart's life can be seen as an acting out of hostility towards the father. In his work he both identified with his father and sought to outdo him in competition for his mother, to whom he was devoted. The fact that much of his most beautiful and gayest music was written in periods of depression affords striking confirmation of Sharpe's, Roheim's and Lee's theories of sublimation.