Eter­nal truths cer­tainly remain eter­nal truths; the char­ac­ters, how­ever, by which they are ex­pres­sed are sub­ject to change in the course of time. And in a time chang­ing as rap­idly as ours some writ­ings – not the truth they con­tain, but the de­scrip­tion of it – van­ish much faster than we be­lieve.
Thus, the in­ner mean­ing of clas­si­cal scores is un­der­stood much less than any ex­pert might real­ize.

Just as the let­ter a to­day is writ­ten on a typewriter in only one way, but pro­nounced quite dif­fer­ently in dif­fer­ent syllables, like­wise, at the time of the clas­sics, for ex­ample, a one-accented d (d’) for a vio­lin was writ­ten down in only one way but, be­cause of the richer mu­si­cal ex­pres­sion of that time, it was played quite dif­fer­ently, de­pend­ing on its con­text in the com­po­si­tion.

In those days the pur­pose of the or­ches­tral re­hearsal (and to some ex­tent of the no­ta­tion) was mainly to cor­rect pos­si­ble de­via­tions from the pre­vailing prac­tice of per­form­ing mu­sic. This has turned into to­day’s or­ches­tral re­hearsal with its des­per­ate effort to trans­form the liv­ing lan­guage of clas­si­cal mu­sic into “typewrit­ten char­ac­ters.” The re­sult is a dying in­ter­est in this mu­sic among the gen­eral pub­lic.

In the tra­di­tional form of no­ta­tion the com­poser pro­vided the skilled per­for­mer with the mini­mum of in­for­ma­tion re­quired to pro­duce the de­sired mu­si­cal re­sult. The play­ing in­struc­tions of the clas­si­cal com­pos­ers had, at their time, rather the char­ac­ter of “mem­ory aids.”
This we can deduct from the com­plex­ity of the in­ner logic of these com­po­si­tions; for it is most un­likely that these great mu­si­cal crea­tors in­tended to ex­press such an im­mense, in­ner com­po­si­tional di­ver­sity with such an unimagi­na­tive play as is the prac­tice to­day.

Thus, un­like the mu­si­cian of to­day, the mu­si­cian of the clas­si­cal pe­riod must have had, as a rou­tine, a de­gree of virtuosity at his com­mand which ist in­com­pre­hen­si­ble to the ana­lyti­cally think­ing mu­si­cian of to­day. Quotation

There­fore, given to­day’s rou­tine of per­form­ance, a com­po­si­tion of Beethoven lit­er­ally be­comes de­prived of its life, and the in­stru­men­talist of the clas­si­cal time would have firmly re­jected such an alienated tech­nique of read­ing a score which leads to such petrification.

In this kind of ana­lyti­cal score read­ing he would have found the means and the way in­terchanged.
How­ever, such an alienation is natu­ral in the course of time.

Thus, with re­gard to the true pur­pose of mu­sic, for us mu­si­cians to­day the re­ward­ing task arises to ex­press the truth anew with the means of our time, in our own fa­mil­iar “col­lo­quial” lan­guage.

And par­ticu­larly be­cause of to­day’s pre­domi­nantly ana­lyti­cal method of de­scrip­tion, the tech­nol­ogy of our cen­tury, and the field of elec­tronics in par­ticu­lar, pre­sents a timely and abundant po­ten­tial for the for­ma­tion of an ex­tremely lively mu­si­cal lan­guage, and there­fore for the suc­cess­ful con­vey­ance of most an­cient truths.