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Critics had long dismissed the composer's later symphonies as wandering and formless, the work of a mind that had lost its discipline. The biographer, however, asks readers to consider the letters from those years, in which the composer described deliberately loosening the old rules to chase a freer kind of expression. What sounded like aimlessness, she argues, was in fact a chosen path, pursued with as much care as his tightly structured early pieces. The fault, in her view, lay not in the music but in listeners who measured it against a standard the composer had knowingly set aside. The biographer's attitude toward the composer's later symphonies can best be described as:

1. reluctantly critical, conceding that the late works lack real structure.
2. openly nostalgic for the discipline of his tightly structured early pieces.
3. defensive of the works as the result of a deliberate artistic choice.
4. uncertain about whether the critics or the composer were correct.

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