RK wrote the following two letters to the music editor of the New York Times, but I found no evidence that they had been published. I thought the letters would be of interest because of their detailed musical content.

January 21, 1942

Dear Sir:

This is an advance fan letter in the hope of helping one of the greatest composers of all time to emerge from counterpoint textbooks and history surveys into the realm of sound. Orlando Lassus, at last, is being given a whole program by the Dessof choirs. For years I have looked forward to this event, and the prospect of it arouses all my missionary zeal. Other people must have the opportunity to find out what they have been missing all these years: Hence this public display of enthusiasm.

Of all “neglected composers,” Orlando Lassus is the one who inspires me with the greatest wonder and admiration. I often have the feeling that here is a master who makes all but the topmost composers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries look like schoolboys. I find myself even wavering in my allegiance to Bach and almost wishing that I could perform with a sixteenth-century chorus instead of a harpsichord!

If ever there was a composer to dispel the idea that all old music sounds alike, it is Lassus. In fact, it is hard to think of a composer of any age who had a more distinguished command of such diverse styles. Nothing could be further from the abstractions of so-called sixteenth-century counterpoint treatises or the theories of “Lassus style” than the French madrigals of Lassus, delicate impressionistic settings of the poetry of Renard and du Bellay, whimsical and airy as Mozart. Here, one thinks, is French music par excellence, music which could only be the product of a thoroughly Gallicized spirit. Yet, when confronted with the grandiose and passionate settings of Petrarch, one recognizes a musician as thoroughly Italian as Monteverdi.