Jean-Nicolas Diatkine comes from a family of recognized doctors and considers commitment to others to be the basis of his profession. It seemed impossible for him to do without this basic attitude in the exercise of his profession, which is why he always sees his artistic development as a return to the essential artistic values to which he has devoted himself over the last thirty years. At the same time, he makes the in-depth study and deeper understanding of the narrative of each composer an absolute priority and an indispensable step before any public performance of a work. Diatkine about Beethoven: Musician-performers might regard the need to introduce and explain the pieces they are about to play as an implicit admission of failure, acknowledging the fact that music might no longer speak for itself. Goethe’s irritated reaction to Schubert’s settings of his poems was of the same order, although in reverse perspective: according to him, music was already included in his poetry. And Beethoven (like Bach) created such a vast, structured world that it defies any attempt at literary explanation for it does not need any. The following presentation illustrates this paradox.