Early Review of Beethoven
That Herr van Beethoven is an accomplished pianist is well known, and even if it were not known, one would be able to surmise it from these variations. Whether he is equally successful as a composer is, however, a question that it would be difficult to answer in the affirmative, judging from these samples of his work … the variations on the first of the themes, which contain clumsy, harsh modulations, are far from pleasing.
http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/haydnj.html (Classical Music Pages, The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music)