Painting by E. B. Lintott.
"The Allegro Finale of the C-sharp-minor Quartet ... wild delight, the lamentation of anguish, ecstasy of love, highest rapture, misery, rage, voluptuousness and sorrow."
For a long time—months, if not years—he had been pursuing, as it were, some beautiful, elusive phantom—the idea contained in Schiller's stirring lines commencing:—"Freude, schöner Götterfunken," ("Joy, thou heavenly spark of Godhead"). He was consumed with the desire to give these lines a worthy setting; he had filled a multitude of note-books with rough sketches; but the authentic, the indubitable melody which should be recognised at first hearing as the only one, had still evaded him until now—now, when he filled the twilight with a cry of success.
"I have it! I have it!" he exclaimed, as those magnificent phrases which were to be the crown and consummation of the great Ninth Symphony, at last were crystallised into shape upon his brain. And at that moment he entered, as it were, upon a new world of light, "in the soil of which bloomed before his sight the long-sought, divinely-sweet, innocently pure melody of humanity."
"Joy, thou heavenly spark of Godhead!" Was it the irony of Fate that made this thought the highest pinnacle of Beethoven's marvellous achievements? Was it not rather one of those divine compensations by which Heaven bestows, with both hands lavishly, "above all that we can desire or deserve?"
Scintillations of that "heavenly spark," multiplied a million-fold, flashed across the mental vision of the inspired composer; incessant majesties of sound piled themselves in splendid strata upon his intellectual ear; until, "blinded with excess of light," and outwearied with the exuberance of a joy beyond all that earth could yield, Ludwig van Beethoven sought his meagre straw mattress and thin quilt, and—while the clocks struck ten in the city—fell asleep as softly as a child.