Christ on the Mount of Olives (Beethoven) of the orchestra and chorus at its premiere. He panned Huber's libretto, saying, in an 1824 letter to the Gesellschaft für Musikfreunde, "Let us leave out of consideration "the value" of poems of this sort. We all know that allowances are to be made... so far as I am concerned, I would rather set Homer, Klopstock, Schiller to music. If they offer difficulties to overcome, "these immortal poets" at least are worthy of it." (Beethoven eventually did set Schiller to music in his monumental Ninth Symphony, nearly twenty years later.) The editors at Breitkopf & Härtel agreed with Beethoven's critical
Curse of the ninth of the work finally performed as an interpretation of his manuscript is problematic. In any case a "Symphony No. 0" by Schnittke has been performed and recorded, so his total should be ten. Alexander Glazunov completed the first movement of his Ninth but worked on it no further for the 26 more years he lived. In an interview recorded at the time of its premiere, Malcolm Arnold stated that he intended his Ninth Symphony (his op. 128) to be his last; it proved to be so, but he was to live for another twenty years, reaching opus 142. Jean Sibelius