lake towards the town where his lost beloved once lived. According to Edward T. Cone, "This famous arpeggiation seems to arise from nowhere to create an atmospheric prelude... and it dies away to nothing in a postlude." The song ends on the diminished seventh chord; there is no resolution, "the dissonance is terminal": The operas of Carl Maria von Weber, particularly Der Freischütz and Euryanthe, featured many passages using this chord. The Wolf's Glen scene in Der Freischütz (1821) is an example. According to his early biographer, Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Ludwig van Beethoven spoke disparagingly of the 'accumulation of diminished seventh chords' in Euryanthe (1823). Beethoven was himself rather fond of the chord and was well aware of its dramatic potential. Perhaps the clearest instance of the diminished seventh's power to evoke mystery and terror can be found in the passage linking the two final movements of Beethoven's Appassionata sonata, Op. 57 (1806). The placid conclusion of the andante movement is interrupted first by a slowly rolled diminished seventh arpeggio played pianissimo, followed by the same chord played an octave above in a sharp, stabbing fortissimo. The final movement of Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique reflects the influence of Weber in its copious use of diminished seventh chords to evoke the spooky atmosphere of a Witch's Sabbath: "a sinister gathering of spectres, monsters and weird, infernal mocking creatures": By the end of the 19th century, composers had used the diminished seventh so much that it became a cliché of musical expression and consequently lost much its power to shock and thrill. By the turn of the 20th century, many musicians were getting weary of it. In his Harmonielehre (1911), Arnold Schoenberg wrote: Symmetry Because a diminished seventh chord is composed of three stacked minor thirds, it is symmetrical and its four inversions are composed of the same pitch classes. Understanding what inversion a given diminished seventh chord is written in (and thus finding its root) depends on its enharmonic spelling. For example, Gdim7 (G–B–D–F) is enharmonically equivalent to three other inverted diminished chords with roots on the other three pitches in the chord: Bdim7 (A–B–D–F) Ddim7 (A–C–D–F) Fdim7 (A–C–E–F) Nineteenth-century composers in particular often make use of this enharmonic to use these chords for modulations. Percy Goetschius calls it the "enharmonic chord." As a result of the symmetry of the chord, if you ignore enharmonic spelling, there are only three distinct