Judgments on Beethoven by Other Musicians
Hans von Bülow reported that Johannes Brahms once said: “Beethoven never adhered so faithfully to the laws of musical form, nor with such Spartan rigor, as in the last sonatas and the last quartets, his most original and most imaginative compositions.” von Bülow
Without wishing to offend any composer, whether deceased or living, I must nevertheless affirm that no one has ever possessed a richness and variety of ideas and an originality comparable to those found in Beethoven’s creations. Ries
Beethoven knew that he could belong to the world only as a free man. And the world had to take him as he was. Nothing could be obtained from him as a musician except what he wished to give, and when it pleased him to give it. But he delighted in one thing alone: enchanting through the figurations of his inner world. The outer world faded for him also because of his increasing deafness. Thus, like an enraptured dreamer, he wandered with wide‑open eyes through the crowded streets of cheerful Vienna.
The onset and worsening of his deafness first cast him into deep sorrow and melancholy. But when it became complete, and when the impossibility of hearing musical performances was absolute, he no longer complained. A deaf musician! Can we imagine a blind painter? Yet we do know the seer who has become blind. The deaf musician now resembles Tiresias who, blind to the phenomenal world, contemplates with the eye of the soul the center from which all phenomena arise.
Undisturbed by the noise of life, Beethoven remains alone, intent upon his inner harmonies. Then the essence of things speaks to him again in the serene light of beauty. Then he understands the forest, the meadow, the blue sky, the joyful crowd, the loving couple, the racing clouds, the roar of the storm, the bliss of inner peace. And then through all his works there penetrates that wonderful serenity which is a hallmark of his music. Wagner
One may well say “the divine Mozart.” But one cannot say “the divine Beethoven.” One must say “the human Beethoven!” For the first time with Beethoven the human element enters music as its principal subject, in place of purely formal play.
At first Beethoven was for his contemporaries nothing more than an astonishing curiosity. An evening on which he performed for the first time the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and the Fourth Piano Concerto left the audience absolutely cold. The Violin Concerto Op. 61 was judged lacking in melody and forced. But shortly afterwards the situation was reversed. A militant sect organized itself spontaneously and from then on guarded the work that had risen to the status of symbol of musical humanity.
Through Beethoven there arose in his successors the ambition to be full of profound meanings. Haydn still wrote symphonies with the same naturalness with which he wrote a piano minuet. Today a cheerful and brief work, however beautiful and wonderfully crafted, is considered a minor piece. To vibrate humanly is the quality demanded of art. Busoni
Do not place Beethoven too early in the hands of the young. R. Schumann
Beethoven succeeds in expressing a primordial torment and desire. Wagner
It seems that Debussy regarded Beethoven as a sombre and tasteless genius. Gruber
This symphony [the Seventh] is the very apotheosis of the dance; it is dance in its most sublime essence. Wagner
The performance of the Pastoral succeeded beyond all expectation, and the incomparable, wonderful delight which in time was to come to me precisely from occupying myself with Beethoven’s works made me feel here for the first time his regenerating power. Wagner
Professor Weyse [Weyse Christoph Ernst Friedrich, Altona 1774–1842 Copenhagen…], a limited and egotistical musician, considers himself unrecognized and despises his contemporaries: of Beethoven he said that he never wrote anything that is truly beautiful. Wieck Schumann
24 November 1842 (in Leipzig), subscription concert. Now we also hear good vocal music. Today it was the turn of the Finale of Così fan tutte, which enchanted me. Dear Mozart must indeed have had good intentions toward the world; he does so much good to the heart, and I have never heard anything of his that did not elevate my spirit. Beethoven’s Eroica concluded the concert. Today the March seemed to me the most beautiful part—solemn, grand, as always; all Beethoven makes this impression on me.
I feel an entirely personal sentiment for these great masters. Mozart I love in a particular way. Beethoven, however, I revere as a God—but a God inaccessible, who never becomes part of us. Wieck Schumann
Giuseppe Verdi, who did not care for honors, when the president of the Beethoven Verein, Joseph Joachim, offered him in 1889 the appointment as honorary member of the association, accepted saying: “In this case I cannot refuse the honor that is offered to me! It is a matter of Beethoven! Before such a name we all bow in reverence.”
This work, in its form, in its melodic style, in its harmonic sobriety and its instrumentation, distinguishes itself from all the other compositions of Beethoven that followed it. In writing it, the author evidently remained under the sway of Mozart’s ideas, which he sometimes enlarged and ingeniously imitated everywhere.
The first Allegro has as its theme a six‑bar phrase which, although having nothing characteristic in itself, becomes interesting through the art with which it is subsequently treated. One then arrives, after a sort of cadence repeated three or four times, at a figure in the wind instruments which is all the more surprising to find there, inasmuch as it had been used several times in the overtures of French operas.
The Andante contains a ‘piano’ timpani accompaniment which today seems to us something quite ordinary; but one must acknowledge that it foreshadows the impressive effects that Beethoven was to create later. This movement is full of charm; the theme is graceful.
The Scherzo is the first-born of that family of enchanting divertimenti whose form Beethoven invented and which, in all his instrumental works, replaced the Minuets of Mozart and Haydn, which have a completely different character. This one has exquisite freshness, agility, and grace. It is the only true novelty of this symphony.
The Rondo Finale is a real musical puerility: in a word, that is not Beethoven. Berlioz
Beethoven here, in the Symphony No. 4 Op. 60, completely abandons ode and elegy in favor of a style less elevated, though perhaps no less difficult, than that of the Second Symphony. The character of this score is, in general, lively, fresh, serene, yet not without a celestial lightness.
With the exception of the meditative introductory Adagio, the first movement is devoted almost entirely to an expression of joy. The Adagio is so pure in its forms, the melodic expression so angelic and of such irresistible effusion, that the prodigious artifice lavished upon it is completely concealed. From the very first bars one is seized by an emotion that in the end becomes so intense as to be overwhelming; and only in one of the giants of poetry could we find something comparable to this sublime achievement of a giant of music—[for example in] the moving episode of Francesca da Rimini in the Divine Comedy, at the final verse in which Dante falls “as a dead body falls.”
The Scherzo consists almost entirely of phrases articulated in duple meter, [but] the melody of the Trio, entrusted to the horns, is of enchanting freshness. The Finale, clear and spirited, consists of a whirlwind of sparkling notes, a continuous dialogue at times interrupted by a rough and trembling chord in which the choleric impulses we have already noted in the composer again become manifest. Berlioz
There exist numerous testimonies confirming Haydn’s hostility toward Beethoven’s music after 1800. For example, a musician of the time recalled that Haydn “simply could not accept Beethoven’s music,” and an Italian musical dictionary reported this judgment by Haydn on his pupil: “I liked the early works very much, but I confess that I do not understand the later ones. It seems to me that he is composing in an increasingly fanciful manner.” Solomon
[Here is what Anton Diabelli wrote] in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, 1818, concerning the Eighth Symphony: “The true lover of art welcomes with open arms this magnificent and brilliant work of the inexhaustible Beethoven, a work which is not at all inferior in style to the earlier and more rudimentary ones, but on the contrary perhaps surpasses not a few of its predecessors in variety, artistic handling, novelty of ideas, and in the most original use of all the instruments; in other words, it is a worthy spiritual offspring of its truly exceptional creator. To judge such classical compositions is one of the most gratifying moments in the generally not particularly pleasant life of a critic.” Diabelli
Love him, love him deeply. Honor his moral strength, which never knew rest. R. Schumann
Beethoven sometimes finds his motifs in the street, to transform them into universal utterances. R. Schumann
However often one listens to it, the Fifth Symphony in C minor Op. 67 exerts upon us each time an invisible power, like those phenomena of nature which, however frequent, fill us each time with awe and wonder. R. Schumann
This composition [Symphony No. 8 Op. 93] has ended up being treated rather ungallantly by being called the “little symphony”; I do not understand what could have justified this epithet. Simplicity, grace, gentle joy—though they are the principal charms of childhood—do not at all exclude the greatness of the forms that represent them. This symphony therefore seems to me entirely worthy of those that preceded and followed it, and all the more remarkable in that it resembles none of them. The Andante scherzando is one of the most delightful things in music; the first Allegro and the Finale seem to me two masterpieces of liveliness and elegant originality; moreover, in the instrumentation of these two movements Beethoven shows himself as powerful as ever; there is therefore nothing “little” in this symphony, and this way of designating it lacks all justification. Berlioz
The Andante scherzando of the Eighth Symphony is one of those inventions for which no model or equal can be found: it is something that fell from heaven whole into the artist’s mind. The Minuet, to tell the truth, is a rather ordinary piece, in which the antiquated form seems to have stifled the thought. The Finale, on the contrary, sparkles with liveliness; the ideas are brilliant and new. Berlioz
Among Beethoven’s symphonies it is the least performed: even in Leipzig, where they are all known and popular, there is some prejudice against the Eighth. Yet in depth and humor it perhaps has no equal. R. Schumann
There is a work by Beethoven known under the name of the Sonata in C‑sharp minor (Op. 27 No. 2, the “Moonlight”), whose Adagio is one of those poems that human language cannot succeed in defining. Its procedure is very simple: the left hand unfolds gently broad chords of a solemnly sad character, whose duration allows the vibrations of the piano to die away gradually on each of them; while the right hand, arpeggiating an obstinate accompanying figure whose form changes scarcely from the first bar to the last, makes heard a kind of lament: the melodic flowering of this dark harmony. Berlioz
Albrechtsberger, the celebrated contrapuntist, also famous for his pedantry, who was Beethoven’s teacher, said of him: “He has learned nothing and will do nothing of his own.” And Beethoven retorted: “Albrechtsberger, a pedant who excelled in the art of creating musical carcasses, an art he placed above everything.” Scuderi
After hearing, in 1829, the Quartet in C‑sharp minor Op. 131, Berlioz wrote: “He has climbed so high that one begins to lack breath. It is music for him alone and for those who have followed the inconceivable ascent of his genius.” Berlioz
What disposed Goethe unfavorably toward Beethoven and made him distrust him was Zelter, his friend and musical adviser, who had presented him with his own image of the musician: “With admiration and dismay,” he wrote on 12 November 1809, “one sees on the horizon of Parnassus talents of the greatest importance, such as Beethoven, using Hercules’ club to drive away flies. One marvels at such a display of talent to give emphasis to trifles, then one shrugs one’s shoulders.” Magnani
Goethe’s ostracism of Beethoven found full assent in Zelter, who extended the rejection to his music, calling it unbalanced, decadent, monstrous. The oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives would be, in his view, an indecency. Magnani
It is impossible to speak of the essence of Beethoven’s music without immediately falling into an ecstatic tone. Wagner
Concerning the Seventh Symphony, Carl Maria von Weber declared that the composer was ripe for the madhouse. Fifteen years later, Castil Blaze would still define the Finale of the work as “a musical madness,” and Fétis would consider it “one of those inconceivable creations that could have issued only from a sublime and sick mind.” Herriot
Verdi judged the disposition of the voices in the last part of the Ninth Symphony to be very poor, while he found the first three movements sublime. And on another occasion he wrote: “I would not be surprised at all if someone were to tell me that the Ninth Symphony is badly written in some places, and that, among the nine symphonies, he prefers certain movements that are not from the Ninth.” Verdi
Rossini, hearing the Ninth in Paris in 1841, declared: “I know nothing more beautiful than the Scherzo of this Symphony.” And he added that he would never have been capable of writing anything similar. The rest, however, seemed to him devoid of charme, and such that music could very well do without it. This is reported in Elwart, Histoire de la Société de Concerts du Conservatoire. It is a verbal remark that Rossini is said to have addressed to Ferdinand Hiller upon leaving the concert. Mila
[In Vienna, in September 1819, the rumour spread that Beethoven would go at four o’clock to the shop of the publisher Steiner. The place was small and could hold about ten people. But the publisher had distributed many invitations, so that at the appointed hour a small crowd gathered in front of the shop. Beethoven, however, did not appear. From a letter by Zelter to Goethe, 14 September 1819.]
Richard Wagner made of the Ninth Symphony—precisely because of the insertion of the voice—the manifesto of the new art: the explicit declaration, on the part of the supreme symphonist Beethoven, that the era of instrumental music should be considered concluded and that a new cycle of the art of sound was now opening, that of the Wort‑Ton‑Drama, the drama conceived as an indissoluble unity of word and sound. [It is needless to recall that this is precisely what later occurred in Wagner’s theatrical creations.]
Wagner, naturally, was drawing water to his own mill, neglecting—or perhaps ignoring—that after the Ninth Beethoven intended to compose a Tenth Symphony in which the use of voices was not foreseen. But one must acknowledge that the Finale of the Ninth seems indeed constructed in such a way as to justify Wagner’s interested inferences, he who advocated the dissolution of the old melodramatic forms into a “drama” founded on continuous musical discourse, with the aim of interpenetrating music with verbal expression. Mila
Prometheus struggling against destiny, in the name of a moral choice of humankind, is a symbol of ideals deeply felt by Beethoven. The Creatures of Prometheus is still a little‑known score compared with the rest of Beethoven’s output. In this work (1800–1801) Beethoven seized what most struck his imagination in order to refine timbral, harmonic, and thematic ideas. For example, he uses the harp and the basset horn, which would no longer appear in his scores (with very rare exceptions, such as the incidental music for Leonore Prohaska, where the harp is required to accompany a Lied).
One also recognizes many melodies that would soon flow into other works, especially the overtures Coriolan, Egmont, and the three Leonore. I discovered new riches in his heroic universe of those years. And I need hardly say what a marvel it is when, in the Finale, a tempo and a melody appear that we shall find in the Eroica. When Beethoven particularly loved a musical idea, he rethought it and deepened it, envisaging different solutions, as happens in Leonore No. 3, in which his formal thought is more evolved than in the two preceding Leonore overtures. Abbado
Beethoven’s work represents a spiritual force that Germany, without him, would not possess. No one has expressed with such effectiveness the power and greatness of German feeling. Furtwängler
To understand Beethoven, it is useless to try to approach his works—clear and determined in their own language, that is, in music—starting from premises that have nothing to do with music, that is, pretending to find “a poetic key.” Only by adhering to musical truth, only by considering the musician, can one probe the soul of this great man, certainly not by starting from literary or psychological premises. Furtwängler
We must regard Beethoven as the sum and compendium of all the musicians who, starting from the conventional forms of music, penetrated to the very essence of music, so as to be able to cast from this center the inner light of the clairvoyant outward. Wagner
One may say that Beethoven was and remained a composer of sonatas, for in the greater part and in the best of his instrumental compositions the “sonata form”—which with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Haydn, and Mozart had reached its definitive legislation—was the veil through which he gazed into the realm of sound. Wagner
[It is said that when the young Beethoven met Mozart in Vienna (an encounter of which we do not know exactly how, when, or even whether it occurred), after playing a sonata for the Master, Ludwig asked Mozart for a theme on which to improvise freely. Mozart was so impressed by the boy’s improvisation that he exclaimed: “Remember this: one day the world will speak of him.”]
The works of Beethoven’s predecessors were generally produced to enliven festivities, princely banquets, and gatherings eager for pleasure. Instead, we see the young Beethoven confronting the world at once with a stubborn boldness that allowed him, throughout his life, to remain in a state of almost wild independence. His superb courage and the extraordinary consciousness he had of himself impelled him at all times to resist the frivolous demands of the world in matters of music.
He had a treasure of boundless riches to defend against the effeminate prevailing taste. In those very forms in which the music of the time manifested itself merely as a pleasant art, he came instead to proclaim the musical oracle of the world’s inner dream. Thus he resembles a possessed visionary who, in the name of the German spirit, opposes—liberating—the spreading corruption of the European popular spirit.
As we celebrate our Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, who saved us from such corruption, so must we exalt the musician Beethoven, who through the German spirit was able to raise music from the humiliation into which it had fallen as a merely agreeable art. With Beethoven’s music another world is revealed to us.
The power of the musician is an operation of magic. Magical indeed is the state into which we enter when, listening to a Beethovenian work, we perceive in every part of the composition a spirit now delicate, now tender, now terrible—a transport full of throbbing, a rejoicing, a languishing, a yearning, an intoxication that seem to arise from the deepest recesses of one’s own being. Wagner
In Beethoven’s music every voice of the accompaniment, every rhythmic note, even the pauses—everything becomes melody. Wagner
Haydn was and remained a servant of princes, who as a musician had to entertain his masters. Mozart’s life was an unbroken struggle for the attainment of that security which was always denied him. To serve as a musician in the household of some prince was intolerable for [Beethoven]. He sought the applause of the great public, gave concerts and academies. As Haydn, in order to amuse the prince, had always to have new works ready, so Mozart had to produce novelties day after day to attract the public. Beethoven abhorred a life such as Haydn’s. But, unlike Mozart, in a world where beauty is rewarded only insofar as it flatters pleasure, and the sublime must remain without recompense, Beethoven found himself unable to win the world’s favor through beauty.
His instincts were too strong to find satisfaction in that superficial and variegated world. Thus his love of solitude grew stronger, since it coincided with his firm resolve to remain independent. And since nothing urged him to seek comforts and pleasantness, he was little inclined—although he had to earn his living through his music—to easy and superficial works, to concessions to current taste, which demanded “pleasant things” and nothing more.
In this way, the more his contact with the external world diminished, the more penetrating became his gaze into the inner world. The more he felt himself the secure master of his inner gifts, the more consciously he asserted his demands upon the external world and required of his patrons not that they pay him for his works, but that they provide in such a way that he, without any further concern for the world, might work for himself alone. And it happened then for the first time in history that persons of high rank [Princes Kinsky, Lobkowitz, and Archduke Rudolph of Austria] guaranteed to a musician, through a life pension, the independence he required. Wagner
His morality was strict, exclusive, bourgeois; frivolity made him shudder. He always refused, in the most resolute manner, to set to music a libretto of frivolous tendencies. His music could penetrate and animate only a passionate and magnanimous action. Wagner
Beethoven’s music will be understood in all times, whereas that of his predecessors will remain comprehensible to us largely only through historical‑artistic reflection. Wagner
What do I think of Beethoven? I bow before the greatness of some of his works, but I do not love Beethoven. My attitude toward him reminds me of what I felt in childhood toward the God Sabaoth—a feeling of awe mixed with fear, without love. Christ, on the contrary, awakens precisely and exclusively a feeling of love. And if Beethoven occupies in my heart a place analogous to the God Sabaoth, I love Mozart as the Christ of music.
It is my profound conviction that Mozart is the highest summit that beauty has reached in the sphere of music. No one like him had made me weep, tremble with enthusiasm at the awareness of that thing we call the ideal. Beethoven too has made me tremble—but chiefly with a kind of fear and tormenting anguish.
Of Beethoven I love the middle period, sometimes the first (that is, the works of the first and second manner), but I detest, to tell the truth, the last, in particular the late quartets. There one finds some glimmers—but nothing more. The rest is chaos. Tchaikovsky, 8 September 1886
The same decisive and revolutionary step that Beethoven took in symphonic forms he also took in the enlargement of pianistic forms. In the history of the piano there has been no transformation greater than that between the sonata of Haydn and Mozart and the Sonata für das Hammerklavier Op. 106 in B‑flat major.
Beethoven created the modern grand piano in its technique, in the exploitation of the high register, the low register, and the most widely separated registers, in the use of the pedal, in the refinement and enrichment of sonority. To accomplish all this he used the sonata—the expressive form natural to him—as the fugue had been one of the natural expressive forms of Bach.
Despite all instrumental conquests, for Beethoven the fundamental element is the musical content: the piano itself is only a means suited to transmit, through performance, that content. Busoni
Moritz Heimann, in one of his tales, has a German poet in Italy say: “They have no Beethoven!” One may well say “the divine Rossini” or “the divine Mozart.” But one cannot say “the divine Beethoven”: it would not sound right. One must say “the human Beethoven.”
But Heimann’s phrase gives us the key to the problem: for the first time, with Beethoven, the human element enters music as its principal subject, in place of purely formal play. Immediately the question arises whether the task of music is to be human rather than to remain pure sound, beautiful form.
Beethoven’s heart was great and pure: the artist Beethoven had the task of giving form to his thought; and his proverbial “struggle” is nothing other than the laborious effort to enclose human emotions within musical forms. All this he achieved: never had music been carried into a region so different from that which it had inhabited until then. Busoni
After the Symphony in D minor, No. 9 Op. 125. Love him—indeed love him greatly—and do not forget that he reached poetic freedom through a path that lasted many years, and honor his moral strength, which never knew rest. His last symphony expresses things so bold and unheard‑of that no language before had dared them.
When they had finished, the master said in a voice almost moved: “Let us then love that lofty spirit who looks down, with inexpressible love, upon the life that gave him so little. I feel that today we have been closer to him than usual.” R. Schumann
Rossini’s visit to Beethoven. The butterfly flew into the path of the eagle, but the eagle swerved, so as not to crush it, with a beat of its wing. R. Schumann
If anyone should ever be absolutely rescued from oblivion, one ought preferably to grant a little immortality to Beethoven’s critics—especially to the one who in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, year 1799, page 151, predicted: “If Mr. von Beethoven would no longer contradict himself and follow the course of nature, with his talent and his diligence he could certainly give us much that is good for an instrument which etc. etc.”
Thirty‑seven years have meanwhile passed; Beethoven’s name shines in the heavens, while the critic has withered in an attic. R. Schumann
A monument to Beethoven—Carve it in a colossal form like the San Carlo Borromeo on Lake Maggiore, so that he may, as he did in life, look out over all the mountains; and when foreigners ask what that giant signifies, every child may answer: “It is Beethoven,” and they will think he is a German emperor.
Oh, if you wish to be useful to the living, found in his honor an academy entitled “Academy of German Music,” in which, above all, his Word shall be taught—the Word according to which music must not be cultivated as a common trade by anyone, but opened by priests as a wondrous world. R. Schumann
J. B. Cramer, who had just brought to London the three Trios Op. 1, still fresh from the press, wrote—deeply moved—after a first reading: “My friends, here is the man who can console us for the loss of Mozart.” Wilder
Arrogance, resentment, and the desire for reconciliation were part of Beethoven’s nature: in this he was absolutely sincere. This consideration offers us the answer to the question: what meaning does Beethoven have for our generation? Sincerity is a fundamental, necessary element for giving life to the work of art. Busoni
Two characteristic traits of Beethoven’s personality were poetic impetus and strong human feeling. These traits are certainly opposed to those of a “classic.” Busoni
You say, Fanny (Fanny, the sister of Felix Mendelssohn‑Bartholdy), that I ought to become a missionary and convert Onslow and Reicha to the love of Beethoven and Sebastian Bach. But remember, my dear child, that these people do not know a single note of Fidelio and consider Bach nothing more than an effigy full of erudition. I played the Fidelio overture for Onslow on a wretched piano; he became completely unsettled emotionally, scratched his head, added the orchestration in his mind, and in the end sang along with me; in short, he almost went mad with joy. Letter to the family, Paris, 20 April 1825. Mendelssohn Bartholdy
The exaltation of Beethoven’s Germanic spirit reappears, in flamboyant tones, in a speech by Hans von Bülow delivered after a concert of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1892: “We need not search further for whom to inscribe on the first page of the Eroica. We musicians dedicate and consecrate with heart and brain, with hands and lips, the Eroica Symphony to the greatest hero who has seen the light since Beethoven’s time. We dedicate it to Beethoven’s twin, to the Beethoven of German politics, Prince Bismarck. Prince Bismarck, hail!” Barzun
Twelve or fifteen years ago—I do not recall whether it was in Milan or elsewhere—I was nominated president of a Quartet Society. I refused and said: Why not establish a Vocal Quartet Society? That is Italian life. The other is German art. It was perhaps blasphemy then as it is now, but an institution of the vocal quartet that had made us hear Palestrina, his best contemporaries, Marcello, etc., would have kept alive in us the love of singing, whose expression is opera. Now everyone tends to instrumentalize, to harmonize. The alpha and the omega: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (sublime in its first three movements, poorly crafted in its last part). They will never reach the height of the first part; they will easily imitate the poor disposition of the voices in the last part and, with Beethoven’s authority, it will be shouted: “This is how it must be done.” Verdi, letter of April 1878.
[Here is a letter from C. M. von Weber to the publisher Hans Georg Nägeli, Mannheim, 21 May 1810, containing criticism of the Eroica and the Fourth Symphony in B‑flat major. It was written when Weber was 24 years old.] It seems to me that you find, in my quartet and Caprice, that I am an imitator of Beethoven, and although this might seem to someone a compliment, I do not like it at all. First of all, I detest anything that has the character of imitation, and secondly my ideas differ so radically from those of Beethoven that I do not believe I could find any common ground with him. The ardent, almost incredible inventiveness of which he is possessed is associated with such confusion in the organization of his ideas that only his early compositions please me, while the later ones seem to me nothing but total chaos, an incomprehensible struggle for novelty, from which now and then a flash of genius shines through, showing how great he could be if only he would restrain his exuberant imagination. Weber
A satirical critique written by C. M. von Weber appeared in the Morgenblatt No. 309, 27 December 1810, concerning the Fourth Symphony in B‑flat major. In this piece the musical instruments speak among themselves in a concert hall, and the owner of the hall joins the conversation:
A double bass: “The devil take whoever forces us to listen to compositions like those every day! I have just come from the rehearsal of a new symphony by one of our newest composers [the Eroica], and although, as you know, I have a robust constitution, I could not endure it any longer, for in a few minutes my strings would have snapped. Rather than being forced to leap about like a rocky wild goat, rather than being turned into a violin to perform the non‑ideas of the worthy composer, I shall become the violin of a dance‑hall orchestra.”
A second cello: “The symphony we have just played is a musical monster, unsuitable to the nature of any instrument, nor to the execution of an idea, nor to any purpose except novelty and the desire to appear original.”
The owner of the hall: “In this enlightened age, when all traditions are cast aside, do you believe that a composer will renounce his divine inspiration to please the likes of you? It is no longer a matter of clarity, precision, and emotion, as in the old days of Gluck, Haydn, and Mozart. No—listen to the recipe for the new symphony I have just received from Vienna [referring to the Introduction and first movement of the Fourth Symphony in B‑flat major]. At the beginning there is a slow section full of short, disconnected ideas, none of which has anything to do with the others. Every quarter of an hour we hear three or four notes. It is exciting! Then there is a muffled roll of the timpani and a mysterious phrase in the viola, all adorned with the right number of pauses and empty bars. Finally, when the audience has lost all hope of surviving the tension and reaching the Allegro, everything explodes into a breakneck tempo, but with the care that no principal theme should emerge.”
Even worse was Weber’s judgment of the Seventh Symphony: he declared that the composer was ready for the madhouse. Despite all this, in October 1823 Beethoven received Weber cordially. [And the two esteemed each other. Beethoven praised Der Freischütz, and Weber, in 1822, brought Fidelio to success.] Schindler