Note 322 — Chapter II · THE ARTIST IN THEORY
Reading edition
He expresses the same idea nearly thirty years later in his essay on Beethoven. "What is the dramatic action of the Leonora opera-text but an almost disagreeable watering down of the drama we have lived through in the overture,—as it were a tedious explanatory commentary by Gervinus on a scene by Shakespeare?" Beethoven, in G.S., ix. 105.