To convey a com­poser’s mes­sage to the cog­niz­ing lis­tener, to com­mu­ni­cate truth through mu­sic, in­sight is not nec­es­sar­ily re­quired on the side of the per­for­mer.
And it proves the far­sightedness of our great clas­si­cal com­pos­ers that they suc­ceeded not only in form­ing a lan­guage which is, for the most part, in­de­pend­ent of the in­di­vid­ual in­sight of an in­ter­preter, but also in mak­ing it the ac­cepted stan­dard.

An anal­ogy may fur­ther ex­plain this state­ment: a Turk, who grew up in Amer­ica, reads Goethe’s “Faust” to a Ger­man in China.
In­deed, the Turk has learned read­ing by com­mon meth­ods. How­ever, the ex­cerpts he reads out from “Faust” will not al­ways be read­ily un­der­stand­able, and the Ger­man lis­tener, not quite enthused about the pronunciation, will not re­gard it as a piece of art.
But even de­spite the shortcom­ings of the pronunciation, the words reach the lis­tener, and Goethe’s mes­sage comes through.

In the same man­ner, our time clads the mes­sages of the great com­pos­ers of the past into the lan­guage of to­day’s in­ter­pre­ta­tion which breathes the clat­ter of ma­chines.
And from the very fact that the per­for­mer is so suc­cess­ful among the masses to­day one may con­clude that he ap­plies the ma­chine-lan­guage of our time par­ticu­larly ob­tru­sively.

Skil­fully and in­con­spicu­ously he blends the noises of day-to-day rou­tine into the lan­guage of the or­ches­tra. But even then, truth man­ages to shine through this machinistic lan­guage so popu­lar to­day even if only like a very lit­tle candle in a very big dark room.

The de­scrip­tion of each level of na­ture re­quires its own de­gree of per­fec­tion, that per­fec­tion which is typi­cal for the level of na­ture be­ing de­scribed.
Un­for­tu­nately, the or­ches­tral lan­guage of to­day is there­fore only quali­fied to de­scribe, to some ex­tent au­then­ti­cally, the world of phys­ics or chem­is­try i.e. the world of un­enli­vened ecol­ogy and, at most, the struc­ture of that which medi­cine deals with to­day in the field of physi­ol­ogy.

In the or­ches­tral rou­tine of to­day, the higher mu­si­cal or­ders that are rep­re­sented in the mu­si­cal scores of the great com­pos­ers can be ap­plied just as lit­tle as a big hoist with its huge booms is suited to show some­one a fine golden ring, deco­rated with subtly cut dia­monds, with­out de­stroy­ing the ring and more­over, with­out dragging the whole scene into the gro­tesque.

So, the mu­si­cian must struc­tur­ally and func­tion­ally adapt his outer means of de­scrib­ing the truth, his ar­ticu­la­tion to the struc­tural or­gani­za­tion of the com­po­si­tion in or­der to ade­quately render the mes­sage.