Friedrich Schiller van Beethoven said that a great poem is more difficult to set to music than a merely good one because the composer must rise higher than the poet – "who can do that in the case of Schiller? In this respect Goethe is much easier," wrote Beethoven. There are relatively few famous musical settings of Schiller's poems. Notable exceptions are Beethoven's setting of "An die Freude" ("Ode to Joy") in the final movement of his Ninth Symphony, Johannes Brahms' choral setting of "Nänie" and "Des Mädchens Klage" by Franz Schubert, who set 44 of Schiller's poems as Lieder, mostly for
Symphony No. 10 (Beethoven/Cooper) as close as he could to Beethoven's style and sketching processes. Cooper's movement consists of an Andante in E major enclosing a central Allegro in C minor. Cooper claimed to have also found sketches for a Scherzo and other later movements, but he deemed them not extensive or developed enough to assemble into a performing version. There are a few references to this work in Beethoven's correspondence. (He had originally planned the Ninth Symphony to be entirely instrumental, the Ode to Joy to be a separate cantata, and the Tenth Symphony to conclude with a different vocal work.) Earlier, in