Its savage violence confronted head-on the aesthetics of impressionism – then at the apogee of Parisian musical fashion – just as the razor-sharp editing between phrases subverted the smooth, seamless flow of the Germanic symphonic tradition with pitiless efficacy.
In his speech he made special mention of our own Philip French, who he said had a "pitiless mind but a kind eye".
In a sense, the works are pitiless.
Those who rail against Wall Street's pitiless insistence on success in other firms should be pleased to know it is now taking an equally harsh view of its own performance.What links all these companies is that their credibility has been damaged.
But at the least Mr Thein Sein and his allies lamented the dead end into which their country was driven, first by military-led socialism and then, under Mr Thein Sein's pitiless predecessor, Than Shwe, by army cronies plundering the country's wealth.
A pitiless dogmatist, he once declined to save two nieces from his own regime.
Atomic energy was the green movement's darkest nightmare: the child of mass destruction, the spawner of waste that will remain dangerous for millennia, the ultimate victory of pitiless technology over frail humanity.
This week thousands of civil servants queued under the pitiless tropical sun to collect their February wages from the small state-owned banks that remain open.
Then, under a pitiless and unopposed German bombardment from the air, the shattered remnants of an Allied army, without stores, without food, without equipment, were rescued from Europe in tugs and trawlers and yachts and rowing boats, in any odd scratch vessel that could make the Channel crossing.
"Under the cover of an abstract concept of 'equality'," says Mr Baverez, the author, French society "practises a pitiless form of apartheid".Does this mean that the French integration model has failed?
Like this reviewer, Mr Vaughan is a former BBC man in Prague; he is pitiless in his analysis of its pusillanimity.
