Beethoven quote

[JoBBC]

Can anyone confirm whether Beethoven actually used the words 'electrical soil' in the quote below. We'd like to use the quote for something we're working on but are concerned it may have been intepreted/added.
"Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents"

Many thanks

[This message has been edited by JoBBC (edited 02-01-2006).]

[Peter]

Don't recall that quote but you might like a similar one "Music should strike fire from a man and bring tears from the eyes of woman" or according to the rather fanciful Bettina Brentano "I must despise the world which does not comprehend that music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and
philosophy. It is the wine which inspires new creations, and I am the Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for men and intoxicates their spirit!"

------------------
'Man know thyself'



[This message has been edited by Peter (edited 02-01-2006).]

[Bobbie]

Originally posted by JoBBC:
Can anyone confirm whether Beethoven actually used the words 'electrical soil' in the quote below. We'd like to use the quote for something we're working on but are concerned it may have been intepreted/added.
"Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents"

Many thanks

[This message has been edited by JoBBC (edited 02-01-2006).]

JoBBC,
It seems very unlikely that the above quote was uttered by Beethoven, but by his friend Bettina von Armin (Brentano), who was notorious for embroidering, inventing and romanticising about her encounters with Beethoven.


My search took me to -

Bettina von Armin, Letters to Goethe's Mother.
translated by -Wallace Smith Murray.

The following particular extract from one of her letters to Goethe's mother, written in Vienna , 1810, contains exactly the interesting quote that you question.

"We do not know whence our knowledge comes, the firmly enclosed seed requires the warm, moist electric soil to sprout, to think, to express itself" (then follows the exact words - MUSIC IS THE ELECTRIC SOIL IN WHICH THE SOUL LIVES, THINKS AND INVENTS.
Philosophy is a precipitation of this electric spirit, and the need that philosophy feels of basing everything on an ultimate principle is in turn relieved by music.
Bettina also says of herself -
"I myself am of an electrical nature. Everything electric stimulates the spirit to fluent, precipitious, musical creation".


.



[This message has been edited by Bobbie (edited 02-02-2006).]

[Michael]

Wasn't Beethoven interested in early uses of electricity, such as galvanism, in his quest for a cure for his deafness? The words may have been familiar to him and useful as an analogy for the creative process.

Michael