The inadmissibility of "interpretation."

"After", perhaps - but not, I imagine" as a direct consequence of"! Interesting as this may be as a piece of contemporary criticism of its time, you do seem to cite very old texts as though they contain some kind of wisdom purely by virtue of their date that can be as pertoinent today as they might (or might not) have been when published which, at the very least, seems to me to be a strategy that is as perplexing as it is risky!

You write that you have "often explained [that] it is every executant's simple duty to be as faithful as he can to the wishes of the composer as set down in the score", adding that, in your view, "lamentably many fail in that simple duty!". What's so "simple" about this?

OK we have a good deal more HIPPs these days than was the case in Liszt's lower middle age when the tradition of performing Western music of past generations was in any case only just beginning to develop but, even then, the very fact that researches have encouraged this has also raised many questions and uncertainties. Whichever way you look at it, instrument manufacture and design, playing techniques and the rest have developed immensely over decades since the 1840s, as have the ways in which and the means whereby we listen to music, whereas the scores remain more or less intact. As Robert Simpson once said, we cannot listen to the music of J S Bach as his contemporaries did becuase we have listened to Xenakis (and I don't imagine that Simpson referred to Xenakis very often!).

More importantly even than this in the present context, however, is the following.

Firstly, it was a fact at that time and remains one today that conventional musical notation is only ever a guide to, rather than a precise blueprint for, the composer's intentions.

Secondly, the composer's intentions are rarely if ever set completely in stone and, if they were, no composer would ever revise anything. Thirdly, some composers have testified to ways in which performers, merely by playing their work, have even encouraged them to make such revisions.

Thirdly, when composers make more than one "version" of one of their own works, the sense of the "definitive" loosens thereby; consider, for example, Busoni's Fantasia Contrappuntistica, the material for which appears in several works under his name (and I'm speaking only of versions in the composer's hand, not arrangements by anyone else at this time), yet even in designating one of them for piano solo as "edizione definitiva" he did not exclude - still less seek to discourage - prforamnce of any of the others.

Fourthly, no two live performances of any work - even by its composer - will or even could be identical; this fact raises the spectre that repeated encounters with recorded performances of works composed before recording technology existed have made it possible to listen to "identical" performances whose very possibility the composer could never in any case have envisaged or perhaps even contemplated.

Fifthly, mere difference in performance acostic can make for what might strike the listener as differences in interpretation.

Lastly, whilst certain interpretations can seem to be and indeed sometimes are less than acceptable, no two listeners will derive, or even expect to derive, the very same from a particular work with each listening in any case.

Speaking as a composer myself, the notion that every aspect of the performance of a work even could, let alone should, somehow be set in stone is as repellent as it is improbable in practice; futhermore, the performers are the intermediaries between the composer and the listener. For both these reasons and indeed others, there can thus be no possibility that the act of interpretation itself can qualify as "inadmissible", otherwise it would be necessary to cease to listen to the performance of music altogether.

Certainly - but, if you don't mind my asking, has your proposal arisen because this forum is deeed to have attracted insufficient contributors / contributions?