How­ever, to­day’s in­ter­pret­ers are vic­tim of a cru­cial error which afflicts the en­tire con­ven­tional ma­chin­ery of mu­sic per­form­ance and re­pro­duc­tion.
The mu­si­cian takes the sym­bols of an in­ner in­spi­ra­tion, as re­corded by the com­poser, for exact in­struc­tions on the outer mu­si­cal event.

The error is ex­actly the same as if one would take the sym­bolic let­ters of an un­known lan­guage for the pic­ture of a land­scape and er­ro­ne­ously at­tempt to de­scribe it as such. How­ever, lan­guage is fraught with mean­ing, and it is the mean­ing in par­ticu­lar which ac­counts for its true value.

Due to the time-pre­vailing, chang­ing un­der­stand­ing of the es­sence of mu­sic, of the pos­si­bili­ties of in­stru­men­ta­tion, and par­ticu­larly of play­ing tech­niques, the in­ner un­der­stand­ing of a score of Beethoven at Beethoven’s time was com­pletely dif­fer­ent from the un­der­stand­ing of to­day’s mu­si­cian who is formed by our time.

Thus, the sys­tem­atics of writ­ing down a score at Beethoven’s time was based on a con­cept quite dif­fer­ent from the pre­sent sci­en­tific, ana­lyti­cal think­ing. Hence, to­day, a score of Beethoven is like the writ­ing of a com­pletely dif­fer­ent time, and if some­one knows not how to read that writ­ing, sim­ply be­cause he is a child of our time, he will not com­pre­hend Beethoven’s score from the same an­gle from which it was writ­ten. By read­ing it, such an in­ter­preter of to­day will natu­rally be un­able to com­pre­hend Beethoven’s com­po­si­tional idea, let alone to real­ize it with an or­ches­tra.

There­fore, to­day’s tech­nique of con­vey­ing mu­sic cor­re­sponds to a Frenchman, who learns Chi­nese verses from an Af­rican and pass­ing them on – with­out un­der­stand­ing their mean­ing – to Turks with the aim of spread­ing euphony.