For the pianist Marc-André Hamelin, who built up his career with technically challenging obscurities, readiness can be defined as a “state in which I feel that I can be trusted in the way that I channel the emotional content of a piece,” he said.

The responsibility of conveying emotional content like the solitude and sadness of late Schubert is one aspect that renders musicians apprehensive, along with the weight of audience expectations and the potential comparison to legendary recordings. Musicians often state that they should wait until they “have something to say” before tackling pieces like Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” or late Beethoven or Schubert, although for the pianist Richard Goode the phrase “having something to say” suggests “an act of will — something extrinsic to a genuine involvement,” he said. “If you are deeply engaged with a work and try to be faithful to it, then, with luck, the music will speak.”

According to Mr. Denk, “In a case like Schubert, who died at 31, he had enough sorrow for a lifetime. There is something about the subtext of his music — people say you have to suffer a little more.” He recalled that when he attended Marlboro (the prestigious chamber music festival in Vermont now run by the veteran pianist Mitsuko Uchida), “there was a feeling that there were the seniors in the back row and they were grousing about how superficially the kids were playing the pieces — a get-off-my-lawn kind of attitude.”

Some student musicians indeed feel they haven’t the requisite life experience to convey such deep emotions through music, said the cellist Paul Katz, a member of the (now disbanded) Cleveland Quartet; he tries to dispel the notion during coaching. In its early days, he said, the Cleveland ensemble was criticized for tackling repertoire that some critics felt the group was too inexperienced to perform.