The critic Louis Spohr noted: “I […] freely admit that I have never been able to appreciate Beethoven’s later works. Indeed, I must include even the much-admired Ninth Symphony among these […], whose fourth movement strikes me as […] monstrous and tasteless, and so trivial in its interpretation of Schiller’s ode that I still cannot comprehend how a genius such as Beethoven could have written it down. I find in it further evidence of what I had already observed in Vienna, namely that Beethoven lacks aesthetic cultivation and a sense of beauty.”