Of all the arts, music undeniably gives rise to the strangest passions and the most absurd ambitions, not to speak of the most singular lunacies. Among the unfortunates locked up in mental hospitals, those who think they’re Neptune or Jupiter are easily recognised as lunatics; but there are many others enjoying complete freedom, whose parents have never dreamed of resorting to psychiatric treatment for them, yet who are obviously mad. Music has thrown their minds out of gear.

I’ll restrain myself from speaking of those men of letters who write, in verse or prose, about matters of musical theory of which they lack the most elementary knowledge, using words whose meaning they don’t understand; who deliberately work themselves up about ancient masters of whose music they’ve never heard a note; who generously attribute to them melodic and expressive ideas they never had, since melody and expression didn’t even exist when they were alive; who admire indiscriminately, and with the same effusiveness, two pieces signed with the same name, of which one is indeed fine, while the other is absurd; in short, who speak and write all the extraordinary nonsense which no musician can hear without laughing. It’s generally accepted that music is a universal art, which anyone may speak and write about: it’s “accessible to all”.

And yet, between ourselves, that phrase may beg the question. For music is both an art and a science; to comprehend it fully requires long, hard study; to feel the emotions it can produce, you need a cultivated mind and a practised sense of hearing; and to judge the merit of musical works, you must also possess a well-stocked memory so as to be able to make comparisons—indeed you must know all sorts of things which inevitably you can get to know only by learning them. So it’s plain that people who permit themselves to pontificate about music without understanding it, although they would shrink from giving their opinions on architecture or sculpture or any other art that’s foreign to them, are in a state of madness. They think they’re musicians, just as the lunatics I mentioned earlier think they’re Neptune or Jupiter. There’s not the slightest difference.