Heinrich Friedrich Ludwig Rellstab bobbed along on a beautiful lake, waxed romantic, and blithely misnamed a Beethoven sonata. I suppose a certain amount of dishonor should fall on his head for that, but I think what is even more dishonorable is that generation after generation after generation of performers should preserve that mischaracterization by simply not taking the composer at his word. Now what seems like a casual and harmless personal observation turns out to have obscured a great work of the imagination. Millions of listeners have imagined a nocturne when the composer described a death scene, and having misunderstood the part, they could not possibly have rightly understood the whole.

For most people this is a very small thing, and given the many other inhumanities pianists have inflicted on mankind, it seems hardly worth mentioning. After all, the pianist is just sharing what the sonata means to him.

Right?

I hope that by now we begin to get some sense of the horror of living among people who think this way: people who do not know what a composer intended because a performer stood in the way. People who choose a pretty falsehood over a genuine insight.

There is such a thing as a "thick layer of false tradition"—to use Schiff's phrase—obscuring the good. Misunderstanding a sonata is far more serious than most people might admit; especially religious people. But extend this mawkish nonsense to cover an entire liturgy and we get a sense of irritation that is perfectly natural when listening to people like Hamilton and Pettit and when we are being asked to sing to God what is not meaningful even to us.

We've had several generations of Christians who are quite smug in the knowledge that they attend a church with "traditional worship" and they never—ever—conceived of the possibility that their false traditions might be as corrupting as the novelties they condemn in others. I'm not defending the (equally unconvincing) novelties, obviously, but the solution to falling off the left side of the bridge is not to fall off the right side.

We are at a delicate moment in human history, I think. Especially religious people. We live with what we believe is true but what is also implausible to those around us.

Both. True and implausible. Beautiful and unattractive. Good and undesirable.

I really don't think we are yet serious enough to clarify what we've already obscured, but I do think we might give some thought to how we stand between the sinner and illumination, between the wretch and grace. There are some of us who are more horrified at what Steve Pettit and his faux-Celtic noisemakers are saying about our God than the infidel is.

Someone mentioned anger as a possible response. I suggest there is a certain cleansing of the Temple which is called for, but that requires an ability to distinguish worship from commerce.

And that's proved tricky.