“To you, possessed of a brain of steel and a cold, blue, unbending will (guarantees of your influence on the twentieth century, both now and later), to you I confess that I am no longer thinking in musical terms, or at least not much, even though I believe with all my heart that Music remains for all time the finest means of expression we have. It’s just that I find the actual pieces — whether they’re old or modern, which is any case merely a matter of dates — so totally poverty-stricken, manifesting an inability to see beyond the work-table. They smell of the lamp, not of the sun.... I feel that, without descending to the level of the gossip column or the novel, it should be possible to solve the problem somehow. There’s no need either for music to make people
think! … It would be enough if music could make people
listen....”
— Letter to Paul Dukas, 1901
