"The last five quartets did not mean so much to the Romantics, and it remained for the twentieth century to make them its own. But to the Romantics, the Ninth Symphony was the beacon. It represented everything the Romantics thought to be the essence of Beethoven―a defiance of form, a call for brotherhood, a titanic explosion, a spiritual experience. The Ninth Symphony was the Beethoven work that most influenced Berlioz and Wagner. It was the Ninth Symphony that remained the unapproachable unachievable ideal of Brahms, Bruckner, and Mahler. To the Romantics, and to many today, the Ninth Symphony is something more than music. It is an ethos, and Debussy was not entirely wrong when he said that the great score had become a "universal nightmare." It pressed too heavily on the music of the century. Only with the last generation have there been those who dare criticize the last movement, but not even those critics have anything but awe for the other three movements. And, indeed, the coda of the first movement, with its slippery, chromatic bass and the awesome moans above it, remains a paralyzing experience. That is the way the world ends. It is absolute music, but it clearly represents struggle, and it is hard to hear so monumentally anguished a cry without reading something into it. the trouble is that faced with such music, all of us tend to become sentimentalists, reading into it the wrong message."