Music really ought to have been an hermetical science, enshrined in texts so hard and laborious to decipher as to discourage the herd of people who treat it as casually as they do a handkerchief! I'd go further and, instead of spreading music among the populace, I propose the foundation of a 'Society of Musical Esotericism'.
Claude Debussy (1862–1918)
letter to Ernest Chausson
1893
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)
Marguerite Gachet at the Piano
(Auvers-sur-Oise, June 1890)