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
Piano Concerto No. 2 (Liszt) Schubert's "Wanderer Fantasy". Beethoven had also used such a device in his Ninth Symphony, transforming the "Ode to Joy" theme during the final movement. With Liszt, however, thematic transformation would become a compositional device to which he would turn time and again—in the symphonic poems, the "Faust" and "Dante Symphonies", and the B minor Piano Sonata. This use of thematic transformation likewise changed Liszt's attitude toward compositional form. Compared to his contemporaries, who still used sonata form more or less conventionally, Liszt departed from the form at times radically. Themes are shuffled into new and unexpected sequences, with their various