I have often made the point in masterclasses that students should not listen to lots of recordings of a piece they are learning. I’m always a little horrified when I hear a student say, “My teacher told me to learn the Chopin G minor Ballade, so I went to the library and took out eight recordings.” To me this limits a student’s horizon even before the eye has been raised to it; it closes off paths even before the putting on of shoes. (Eight different editions? Well that’s a different story!)

Of course, it was impossible to do this until recently. A conducting learning a Beethoven symphony in 1902 had to sit down at a desk or piano and … learn the score. The danger now is that we’ve become lazy and can merely absorb other people’s “Beethoven Experience” rather than living through our own. It’s much harder work to draw the map ourselves, but I’m convinced we learn more about the inner topography that way, even if the first draft can send us on a false path or two. And it’s from this study that we can go on to have original ideas that are neither copied nor capricious.

Stephen Hough (2019) Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More. London: Faber & Faber, p. 29.