Rambling. The Rules of Music.

Music is in itself passion and vagueness.

With words, human things are said; with music, that which no one knows or can define, but which exists in everyone to a greater or lesser extent, is expressed. Music is art by nature. It could be said that it is the eternal field of ideas…

To be able to speak of it, one needs a great spiritual preparation and, above all, to be intimately united to its secrets. No one, with words, will express a heartbreaking passion as Beethoven did in his Appassionata; we will never see the souls of women that Chopin expressed to us in his Nocturnes….

To feel it, it is necessary to possess a crazy and nervous imagination, and it can almost be affirmed that, once the formidable dragon of its technique has been defeated, the one who has fantasy and passion inside speaks with it unconsciously (…).

There are ideas in men so grandiose that they do not admit the compass mold; and if they vary it and break it with love, with fire, just as they feel it, if with that they have expressed a rare thought, it must be considered well done; and if we feel it in their pain, we have to affirm its enormous expression and, therefore, how enormously artistic it is…

And we must also think that in music, where so much pain is expressed that it leaps above all things and will produce rare inharmonic and harmonic alterations…But what could be more deranged than pain?