Do you want to know something? They don’t believe in their own music. They think it’s put together well, modern, but they are the first to be bored stiff by it. But of course they have to do it that way or pay the penalty of being pretentious, like that damned Weber or that old dolt of a Father Beethoven! / Hypothesis: if one of them could, oh so reluctantly, write a Freischütz Overture some fine morning, he wouldn’t dare show it. The fact is it’s lousy with melody. Damned if I know where Weber’s mind was that day. What’s good about it? I can hear the Oberon Overture twenty times in succession; I could’t listen twice to the “Bénédiction des poignards”; and I’ve had my fill of one as much as other.