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
Curse of the ninth "serious" music criticism. Though composers can indeed be found who died after achieving nine symphonies (the most famous example perhaps being Ludwig van Beethoven), nine is not a statistically predominant total in the history of the symphony. In addition, while some very prominent composers (e.g. Schubert, Dvořák, Spohr, Bruckner, Mahler, and Vaughan Williams) are regularly adduced as examples, several of them are only credited with having "composed nine symphonies" as a result of error or oversimplification (see below). According to Arnold Schoenberg, this superstition began with Gustav Mahler, who, after writing his Eighth Symphony, wrote "Das Lied von der Erde",