Note 371 — Chapter II · THE ARTIST IN THEORY (continued 2)

Letter 57 (15th February 1852) in Briefe an Uhlig, p. 160. It was his complaint against Mendelssohn's conducting of the Beethoven symphonies that it brought out "merely their purely musical side," not their poetical content. Not understanding the spirit of them, Mendelssohn kept to the letter. His inability to understand the inner meaning of the music caused him to fall into the grossest errors of tempo. He took the first movement of the Ninth Symphony, for example, so fast that "the whole thing became the direct opposite of what it really is" (Letter 56 to Uhlig, 15th February 1852, p. 162).