If a survey had been conducted among nineteenth-century concert-goers, asking them which musical genre they considered the most typically German, the majority would probably have replied, ‘The symphony’. German-language opera struggled to assert its independence of Italian and French models; choral works were not held in high esteem as aesthetic objects in their own right since they were too closely intertwined with the national festival culture. Symphonic music, in contrast, could boast both a venerable tradition and aesthetic superiority. The latter had been established in the literary writings of the early Romantic school, who regarded large-scale instrumental music without any obvious extraneous function as the ‘purest’ and hence the ‘highest’ of all art forms. Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven represented the symphonic heritage; particularly Beethoven's works became paradigms of both the symphonic and the German, prompting Robert Schumann to open a review of new symphonies with the following observation: