Jocelyn Wang replies to me replying to her:

>>>A performance that does not observe all repeats as intended by the
>>>composer cannot possibly be superb because it is patently contrary
>>>to what the composer has made clear the piece should be.
>>
>>Unless, of course, the composer made a mistake or miscalculated.  But
>>apparently the composer can never be wrong.  Sweet racket.
>
>Given that the music is a product of the composer's soul, he is the only
>one who is qualified to say what his piece should be.

Forgive me, but music is also the product of a composer's technique, and
this is by no means synomymous with soul.  In fact, I don't know about
a composer's soul, but I do know the written piece, my reactions to it,
and what in the piece makes me react that way.  Criticizing a piece - and
that's what failure to follow all the composer's marks often amounts to -
becomes untenable if we're talking only about soul.  We would presume too
much to judge *anybody's* soul.  However, we're also talking about a
composer's technical judgment.  This seems to me fair game.  In other
words, we shouldn't have to submit to composers' opinions - high or low -
of their own stuff.  We don't take authors' views of their own work,
painters' judgments of their own canvanses, or actors' reviews of their
own performance as gospel.  Why does a composer, even Bach and Beethoven,
get such dispensation?

I grant you that it's very unlikely that any conductor's idiosyncratic
judgment of Beethoven in particular would be sharper than the composer's.
But "very unlikely" doesn't mean "impossible," and you still have to judge
particular performances - not a priori, but on their own terms and within
the context of Beethoven performances in general.

Perhaps I'm missing something.  Would you throw out a performance of, say,
the Eroica which had imagination and poetry and held narrative interest,
solely because it didn't observe one of the repeats? If so, we must agree
to differ.

Steve Schwartz