"So much is spoken about music and said so few. I generally believe, the words are not sufficient, and would I think they are sufficient, I would make at the end no more music. People normally complain, the music is so ambiguous; it is so dubious what they would have to imagine thereby, and nethertheless everybody would understand the words. I feel just reversed. And not only with whole speeches, also with single words, they seem to me so ambiguously, so indeterminately, so misleadingly compared with a right music, which fulfils the soul with thousand better things than words. What expresses to me music which I love, are me not too indeterminate thoughts, in order to verbalise them, but too determinate ones. The notes have an also determinate sense like the words, maybe an even more determinate one."

(Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Oktober 1842)