It was that year when his music finally found a reviewer equal to it. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was a critic, composer, painter, and in his later years creator of fantastical tales that made him one of the most celebrated German authors. Hoffmann wrote operas and after he died had an opera written about him, Tales of Hoffmann. He had changed his name to include Mozart’s middle one. In all capacities he was a defining voice of the Romantic spirit. His two Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung articles of July 1810 on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony live in history as the first important exposition of
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