Those who cherish the fantastic notion that the Symphony was conceived _ab initio_ as a celebration of joy, and therefore feel obliged to go back to Beethoven’s first design to compose music for Schiller’s ode, have a large territory for the play of their fancy. Beethoven formed the plan of setting the ode while still living in Bonn in 1793. It is heard of again in a sketchbook of 1798, where there is a melodic phrase adapted to the words, “Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen.” Amongst sketches for the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies (say in 1811) there crops up a melody for the beginning of the hymn, and possibly a little later (1812) a more extended sketch amongst material used in the Overture, Op. 115, into which he appears at one time to have thought of introducing portions of it. All these sketches, of course, preceded the melody of 1812, conceived for use in a “_Sinfonie allemand_.” When Beethoven first took up the ode for setting it was to become a “durchkomponirtes Lied,” i. e., each stanza was to have an illustrative setting; when he planned to incorporate it in an overture he proposed to use only selected portions of the poem, for he accompanies the melodic sketch with the note: “Disjointed fragments like Princes are beggars, etc., not the whole”; and a little later: “disjointed fragments from Schiller’s _Freude_ connected into a whole.”[110] The questions which have been raised by the choral finale are many and have occupied the minds of musicians, professional and amateur, ever since the great symphony was first given to the world. In 1852 Carl Czerny told Otto Jahn that Beethoven had thought, after the performance, of composing a new finale without vocal parts for the work. Schindler[111] saw the note in Jahn’s papers and wrote in the margin: “That is not true”; but it must be remembered that there was a cessation of the great intimacy between Beethoven and Schindler which began not long after the Symphony had been produced, and lasted almost till Beethoven was on his deathbed. Schindler can not have been present at all of the meetings between Beethoven and his friends at which the Symphony was discussed. Nevertheless he is upheld, in a measure, by the fact (to which Nottebohm directed attention) that Beethoven, if he made the remark, either did not mean it to be taken seriously or afterwards changed his mind; for after keeping the manuscript in his hands six months he sent it to the publisher as we have it. Seyfried, writing in “Cäcilia” (Vol. IX, p. 236), faults Beethoven for not having taken the advice of well-meaning friends and written a new finale as he did for the Quartet in B-flat, Op. 130. Even if one of the well-meaning friends was Seyfried himself, the statement has value as evidence that Beethoven was not as convinced as Czerny’s story would have it appear that the choral finale was a mistake. Sonnleithner, in a letter to the editor of the “Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung” in 1864, confirmed