Politics continued to determine the popular reaction to the symphony's first performance. Critics saw the work as a clumsy attempt at orchestral writing that departed too stridently from the classical symphonic form and harmonic rules of Haydn and Beethoven. Contemporaries, mostly allied with the conservative faction of the Société Nationale de Musique, were unsparing. The noted music critic CAmille Ballaigue (1858-1930), a close friend and voluminous correspondent of Camille Saint-Saëns, dismissed it is as "arid and drab music, without ... grace or charm," and derided the principal four-bar theme upon which the symphony expands throughout as "hardly above the level of those given to Conservatoire students." It is derived from the 'Muss es sein?' fragment from Beethoven's final String Quartet op. 135. The review "Le Ménestrel" called it "morose... had very little to say here, but he proclaims it with the conviction of the pontiff defining dogma." And Charles Gounod, also making implicit reference to the idea of a dogmatic German style, wrote of it: "incompetence pushed to dogmatic lengths."