He admits that people like it, but, according to him, the author had no right to write it and the listener has no right to admire it.

Scholars often have strange ideas.
Then Richard Wagner came along and the reign of the ninth dominant took the place of the seventh.

That is what gives _Tannhauser_, and _Lohengrin_ their exciting character, which is dear to those who demand in music above everything else the pleasure due to shocks to the nervous system.

Imitators have fallen foul of this easy procedure, and with a laughable naivete imagine that in this way they can easily equal Wagner.
And they have succeeded in making this valuable chord absolutely banal.
[Illustration: Jacques Offenbach] By adding still another third we have the dominant eleventh.

Offenbach used this, but it has played but a small part since then.