"I told myself that it served me right, that I was too old to go gallivanting around with this younger generation, that if I would eat prickly musical pears I must not be surprised if I suffered from aural colic. Nevertheless, when certain of the Schoenberg compositions reached me from Vienna I eagerly fell to studying them. I saw then that he had adopted as his motto: Evil, be thou my good! And that a man who could portray in tone sheer ugliness with such crystal clearness is to be reckoned with in these topsyturvy times."—James Gibbons Huneker reflecting on his first experience of Pierrot Lunaire in the essay "Arnold Schoenberg," collected in Ivory Apes and Peacocks, published 1915.
My copy, purchased for $10.95 at Caveat Emptor, a used book store in Bloomington, is inscribed "To my dear Tom, Christmas, 1915" in lovingly precise female penmanship, in pencil.
