Ode to Joy himself regarded it as a failure later in his life, going so far as to call it "detached from reality" and "of value maybe for us two, but not for the world, nor for the art of poetry" in an 1800 letter to his long-time friend and patron Christian Gottfried Körner (whose friendship had originally inspired him to write the ode). The lines marked with * have been revised as follows: Academic speculation remains as to whether Schiller originally wrote an Ode to Freedom "(Ode an die Freiheit)" and changed it to an Ode to Joy. "... [T]he thought lies
Stephen I of Hungary 1989. A popular hymn, still sung in the churches, was first recorded in the late . It hails King St. Stephen as "radiant star of Hungarians". Ludwig van Beethoven composed his "King Stephen Overture" for the inauguration of the Hungarian theatre in Pest in 1812. According to musician James M. Keller, "[t]he descending unisons that open the "King Stephen Overture" would seem to prefigure the opening of the "Ninth Symphony" [a]nd then a later theme, introduced by flutes and clarinets, seems almost to be a of the famous "Ode 'To Joy"' melody of the Ninth Symphony's finale". Hungarian composer Ferenc