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I think all sorts of precautions are necessary against German music. Suppose that someone loves the south the way I love it, as a great school for convalescing in the spiritual and sensual sense, as an unrestrained abundance of sun and transfiguration by the sun, which spreads itself over an existence which rules itself and believes in itself. Now, such a man will learn to be quite careful as far as German music is concerned, because in ruining his taste again it ruins his health again as well. Such a man of the south, not by descent but by faith, must, if he dreams of the future of music, also dream of a redemption of music from the north and have in his ears the prelude to a more profound, more powerful, perhaps more evil and more mysterious music, a supra-German music which does not fade away, turn yellow, and grow pale at the sight of the blue voluptuous sea and the brightness of the Mediterranean sky, the way all German music does, a supra-European music which justifies itself even when confronted with the brown desert sunsets, whose soul is related to the palm trees and knows how to be at home and to wander among huge, beautiful, solitary predatory beasts. . . . I could imagine to myself a music whose rarest magic consisted in the fact that it no longer knew anything about good and evil, only that perhaps here and there some mariner's nostalgia or other, some golden shadow and tender weaknesses would race across it, an art which from a great distance could see speeding towards it the colours of a sinking moral world - one which has become almost unintelligible - and which would be sufficiently hospitable and deep to take in such late fugitives.-