Page:Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (Grove).djvu/10

6 of the Finale to the Fantasia is note for note the same with a song—Seufzer eines Ungeliebten—which was composed by Beethoven at or shortly after the date of his first announcing his intention to compose Schiller's Freude. The eventual return to the same melody, or one so closely akin to it, may have been one of those acts of "unconscious cerebration" of which many instances could be furnished in the practice of the arts.

Beethoven has not used the whole of Schiller's words, nor has he employed them in the order in which they stand in the poem; and the arrangement and selection appear to have troubled him much. The note-books already cited abound with references to the "disjointed fragments" which he was trying to arrange and connect, mixed with strange jokes, hard to read and harder to understand, such as "Abgerissene Sätze wie Fürsten sind Bettler u. s. w. nicht das Ganze." Another point which puzzled him greatly was how to connect the vocal movement with the instrumental ones. His biographer, Schindler, gives an interesting description of his walking up and down the room, endeavoring to discover how to do it, and at length crying out, "I've got it, I've got it!" Holding out his sketch-book, Schindler perceived the words, "Lasst uns das Lied des unsterblichen Schiller singen,"—"Let us sing the song of the immortal Schiller,"—as a recitative