"Norrington: that is something the Victorians and the puritans and the followers of Ajiatolah just can't understand; that you may be deeply serious and humorist at the same time. That is the point of the issue. I think that this idea, that music should be sehr ernst and not an occasion for humor, started from the Victorian epoch, when music was an upper class activity, which distinguished you from the troglodytes. Besides this, the time all this gravity got started was the time in which religion was indeed too much questioned, and for a while music attained the significance of a religion —it acquired stained-glass windows — and Wagner was the archpriest. It now was the ‘mystical world of German music', it ought to seem difficult, heavy, an embodiment of the authentic — everything Beethoven reproved. And of course, any one authority standing up and saying ‘we are right, my child', I can not bear."

Thus, the re-antiquating cries for a return to the authentic past laboriously but unsuccessfully try to cover up a variety of shallow and arbitrary ideas, and in Norrington's case the mixture of trifling existentialism and cafeteria-revolutionism. The first is not so provocative, as dangerous the second is: the uncompromising saviors are unmasked as servants of despotism, reminding us that contempt for the transcendent and always unexplainable meaning has always been the illness which gives birth to despotism and exploits it in order to infect everything. The sonic aspect of the corruption promoted by the re-antiquating movement, is very well described by Samuel Lipman:

As one makes one's way through Norrington's recordings of the Beethoven symphonies, one soon recognizes that they indeed sum up the authentic-performance movement. Here, to begin with, are all its characteristic tonal features: string sounds, especially when unaccompanied by the other sections of the orchestra, reminiscent of what is produced by a harmonium; raucous wind playing, by turns muffled and shrieking, tympani sounds resembling what happens when a bean-bag is dropped on a tabletop. Overall balance between sections, assisted by the weakness of the string playing and by the brute force of (especially) the trumpets and the horns, so favors the winds and the brass that essential melodic features when played by the strings (the opening theme of the Eighth Symphony is a case in point are often blotted out. Taken together, these attributes produce a choked, clipped sonority dependent on the booming acoustics of the recording space and on the addition of electronic resonance for any life whatsoever. (...) short note durations; much attention to detached playing in fast passages; strident accentuation; over-regular organization by bar-lines as a substitute for the natural flow of melodies. Tempos, as always proudly fulfilling Beethoven's own metronome markings, seem most strikingly to be chosen from a range restricted to fast, faster, and fastest. (...) almost all the time —the foundation of the performance (...) is the tick-tock of the metronome. (...) All the reviewers, it is true, speak of the coruscating excitement they seem to get out of Norrington's work, but this verdict only proves how indistinguishable in modern criticism true excitement is from mere panic.