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
Symphony No. 4 (Beethoven) the first movement, which Leonard Bernstein described as a "mysterious introduction which hovers around minor modes, tip-toeing its tenuous weight through ambiguous unrelated keys and so reluctant to settle down into its final B major." Hector Berlioz was so enamoured of the symphony's 2nd movement that he claimed it was the work of the Archangel Michael, and not that of a human. Robert Schumann called Beethoven's graceful Fourth Symphony "a slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants" (i.e., the more ponderous 3rd and 5th). According to musicologist Robert Greenberg of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music: Symphony No. 4 (Beethoven)