Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: One Of A Series

I confess freely that I could never get any enjoyment out of [this composer's] last works. Yes, I must include among them even the much admired [last] symphony, the fourth movement of which seems to me so ugly, in such bad taste, and ... so cheap that I cannot even now understand how ... [the composer] could write it down. I find in it another corroboration of what I had noticed already in Vienna, that [this composer] was deficient in esthetic imagery and lacked the sense of beauty.

—Composer and conductor Louis (Ludwig) Spohr in Selbstbiographie (1861) on Beethoven and the fourth movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9.

(Adapted from Nicolas Slonimsky's, Lexicon of Musical Invective)