Preface: After writing the poem Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and compiling the Notes to the poem, I wish to document the Beethoven quotes cited. I have consulted books on Beethoven at Los Altos Library and Stanford's Music Library. Below are typed passages on Beethoven's philosophical and religious beliefs from these books for my personal reference. Additional web links are included for those interested in studying more about Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and his work....
Beethoven loved the countryside and was forever inclined to wander alone in places of natural beauty, and to be triggered into a contemplative mood by what he saw. Sometimes he would feel free enough to relate his ideas to a companion, as when he once walked in a partly tamed but romantically beautiful landscape with Johann Stumpff, the man who was destined to brighten the last weeks of Beethoven's life by delivering to him the complete works of Handel. Beethoven sat on a mound and preached a small sermon to his friend, which Stumpff related later in slightly decorative but still recognisably Beethoven language:
Here, surrounded by the products of Nature, often I sit for hours, while my senses feast upon the spectacle of the conceiving and multiplying children of Nature. Here the majestic sun is not concealed by any dirty roof made by human hands, here the blue sky is my sublime roof. When in the evening I contemplate the sky in wonder and the host of luminus bodies continually revolving within their orbits, suns or earths by name, then my spirit rises beyond thes constellations so many millions of miles away to the primeval source from which all creation flows and from which new creations shall flow eternally... Yes, it must come from above, that which strikes the heart; otherwise it's nothing but notes, body without spirit, isn't that so? (p. 104)
Woods and trees especially provided him with that cosmic echo, at times transporting him into exalted moods of an almost mystical intensity: the trance-like state of mind which he had learned from Frau von Breuning to call 'raptus' or 'rapture'. Thus in the autumn of 1812 he jotted on some music paper:
Almighty One in the woods I am blessed... Every tree speaks through Thee O God! What glory in the woodland. On the heights is peace, peace to serve Him.
And again in the summer of 1814, relaxing at Baden:
My miserable hearing does not trouble me here. In the country it seems as if every tree said to me: 'Holy! Holy!— Who can give complete expression to the ecstasy of the woods! O, the sweet stillness of the woods!
http://www.wisdomportal.com/Beethoven-Mind.html
Beethoven loved the countryside and was forever inclined to wander alone in places of natural beauty, and to be triggered into a contemplative mood by what he saw. Sometimes he would feel free enough to relate his ideas to a companion, as when he once walked in a partly tamed but romantically beautiful landscape with Johann Stumpff, the man who was destined to brighten the last weeks of Beethoven's life by delivering to him the complete works of Handel. Beethoven sat on a mound and preached a small sermon to his friend, which Stumpff related later in slightly decorative but still recognisably Beethoven language:
Here, surrounded by the products of Nature, often I sit for hours, while my senses feast upon the spectacle of the conceiving and multiplying children of Nature. Here the majestic sun is not concealed by any dirty roof made by human hands, here the blue sky is my sublime roof. When in the evening I contemplate the sky in wonder and the host of luminus bodies continually revolving within their orbits, suns or earths by name, then my spirit rises beyond thes constellations so many millions of miles away to the primeval source from which all creation flows and from which new creations shall flow eternally... Yes, it must come from above, that which strikes the heart; otherwise it's nothing but notes, body without spirit, isn't that so? (p. 104)
Woods and trees especially provided him with that cosmic echo, at times transporting him into exalted moods of an almost mystical intensity: the trance-like state of mind which he had learned from Frau von Breuning to call 'raptus' or 'rapture'. Thus in the autumn of 1812 he jotted on some music paper:
Almighty One in the woods I am blessed... Every tree speaks through Thee O God! What glory in the woodland. On the heights is peace, peace to serve Him.
And again in the summer of 1814, relaxing at Baden:
My miserable hearing does not trouble me here. In the country it seems as if every tree said to me: 'Holy! Holy!— Who can give complete expression to the ecstasy of the woods! O, the sweet stillness of the woods!
http://www.wisdomportal.com/Beethoven-Mind.html
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