Beethoven

I've been reading a biography of Beethoven, and came across a remarkable passage that I thought was worth sharing. The year is  1810; a prominent music critic, E. T. A. Hoffmann, has reviewed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung where he calls it "one of the most important works of the time". Hoffmann then attempts to set Beethoven in context:

In Haydn's compositions the expression of a youthful, light-hearted spirit is dominant. His symphonies lead us into an infinite green grove, in a cheerful, gaily colored throng of merry people. Mozart leads us into the depths of the spiritual world. Fear grips us, but without torment; it is more a foreboding of the eternal... Beethoven's instrumental music also opens up to us the world of the immense and infinite. Glowing rays of light blaze through the dark night of this world and we are made conscious of gigantic shadows which surge up and down, gradually closing in on us more and more annihilating everything within us, except the torment of endless longing...Beethoven bears deep within his nature the romantic spirit of music, which he proclaims in his works with great genius and presence of mind. Your reviewer has never felt this so clearly as in this particular symphony which, more than any other of his works, unfolds Beethoven's romantic spirit in a climax rising straight to the end and carries the listener away irresistibly into the wondrous spirit world of the infinite.

 Beethoven himself said of his muse:

You will ask me where I get my ideas. That I cannot tell you with certainty; they come unsummoned, directly, indirectly -- I could seize them with my hands -- out in the open air, in the woods, while walking, in the silence of the night, early in the morning, incited by moods, which are translated by the poet into words, by me into tones that sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down into notes.