Note 96 — Chapter II
Albert Heyem Nachmen Baron translation
Mendelssohn wrote to an author who composed verses for his Lieder: "Music is more definite than speech, and to want to explain it by means of words is to make the meaning obscure. I do not think that words suffice for that end, and were I persuaded to the contrary, I would not compose music. There are people who accuse music of being ambiguous, who allege that words are always understood: for me it is just the other way; words seem to me vague, ambiguous, unintelligible, if we compare them to the true music that fills the soul with a thousand things better than words. What the music that I like expresses to me seems to me too definite, rather than too indefinite, for anyone to be able to match words to it."