On January 26, 1793, Bartholomaeus Ludwig Fischenich wrote to Charlotte von Schiller:

"I am enclosing with this a setting of the "Feuerfarbe" on which I would like your opinion. It is by a young man of this place whose musical talents are universally praised and whom the Elector has sent to Haydn in Vienna. He proposes also to compose Schiller's ‘Freude' and indeed strophe by strophe. I expect something perfect for as far as I know him he is wholly devoted to the great and the sublime. Haydn has written here that he would put him at grand operas and soon be obliged to quit composing. Ordinarily he does not trouble himself with such trifles as the enclosed, which he wrote at the request of a lady" (Thayer 120- 121).

We shall learn in part 3 of this ‘History of the Ode to Joy' how Beethoven would carry this plan with himself and how it grew with him while its writer, Schiller, was still alive: thus, part 3 will describe Beethoven's and Schiller's lives up to Schiller's death in 1805.