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
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)