There’s a certain time of year when music of all kinds is rife in the great cities, especially Paris and London, when walls are covered with concert notices and foreign virtuosi flock in from every corner of Europe to compete with each other and with local performers. These new-style advocates fall upon the unfortunate public and violently demand its verdict in their favour—they would willingly pay, not just to gain its backing for themselves, but to deny it to their rivals. But audiences, like witnesses, do not come cheap, and are not just to be had for the asking.

This terrible time is known in the jargon of the music profession as “the season”.

The season! It explains and justifies all sorts of things that I’d like to call mythical, but which are only too true.

Critics find themselves assailed by people in a hurry who have come from far away to make their reputations in the big city, and who, wishing to succeed quickly, try to bribe them with Dutch cheeses.

It’s the season!

Five or six concerts are given every day, all at the same time, and their organisers are outraged to find the poor critics absent from some of them! So they write inquisitorial letters, full of spite and indignation, to the absentees.

It’s the season!

An unbelievable number of people, considered in their own part of the world to possess some talent, come to prove that outside it they have none, or only that of making a cheerful audience solemn and a solemn one cheerful.

It’s the season!

Among this great mass of musicians, men and women, treading on each other’s toes, elbowing and jostling and sometimes even treacherously tripping up their rivals, one can still be lucky enough to discern some fully grown talents which tower above the host of mediocrities like palm-trees over tropical forests. Thanks to these exceptional artists, some truly fine music-making can be heard from time to time, a consolation for all the other horrors one has to put up with.

It’s the season!

But once this time of year is over, you may fall prey to burning thirst after long abstinence and yearn desperately for a cup of pure harmony: impossible.