Bettina von Arnimaus romantic + classic

Bettina von Arnim (* 4 April 1785 in Frankfurt am Main; † 20 January 1859 in Berlin) was a German writer, draughtswoman and composer.

Life

Bettina Brentano was the seventh of twelve children of the merchant Peter Anton Brentano and his second wife Maximiliane, née von La Roche. The aristocratic family, originally from Italy, was wealthy. They owned the Haus zum Goldenen Kopf in the Große Sandgasse in Frankfurt am Main, which was later managed by Bettina’s brothers and was the headquarters of a flourishing export and import company, from which Bettina received a considerable inheritance. Bettina was called ‘the goblin’ by her siblings from an early age; the nickname stuck with her later in Berlin society.

Bettina’s mother died in 1793. The daughter was therefore educated in a convent in Fritzlar – the Fritzlar Ursuline School – until the age of 11 (1794-1796). After her father’s death, she lived with her grandmother Sophie La Roche in Offenbach am Main from 1797, and later in Frankfurt am Main. Her sister Kunigunde Brentano was married to the legal scholar Friedrich Karl von Savigny and lived in Marburg, where Bettina stayed with them for some time.

In 1804, a friendship and correspondence began with Karoline von Günderrode.

1806-1808 saw the publication of the folk song collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn by her brother Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim and her collaboration on Arnim’s Zeitung für Einsiedler.

In 1807, when she was 22 years old, she met Goethe for the first time in Weimar. Wieland had recommended her to him as the granddaughter of Sophie La Roche.

In 1810, she followed the Savignys to Berlin. On this journey, she arrived in Vienna on 8 May and stayed there with her sister-in-law Antonie Brentano, who introduced her to Ludwig van Beethoven at the end of May. According to her own letters and memories, she only met Beethoven three times before she left the city again on 3 June and travelled on to Prague with the Savigny family. However, this encounter had a decisive influence on her.

In 1811, Bettina Brentano married Achim von Arnim, whom she had already met in Frankfurt as a friend and literary colleague of her brother Clemens Brentano. The Arnims were married for twenty years until his sudden death in 1831. The couple mainly lived separately – while Bettina lived in Berlin, Achim managed the Wiepersdorf estate.

Bettina von Arnim’s literary and social commitment only came into the public eye after the death of her husband in 1831, whose works she published. The new autonomy made possible by her widowhood led to an increase in her public activities. She became the editor of his collected works. During the cholera epidemic in Berlin, she became involved in social aid measures in the poor neighbourhoods and cared for the sick. To mark the accession to the throne of Prussian King Frederick William IV in 1843, she published the social reportage Dies Buch gehört dem König. The work, consisting of fictional dialogues between Goethe’s mother and the mother of the Prussian king, was banned in Bavaria.

In the disillusionment that followed the failed revolution of 1848, she wrote the sequel Conversations with Demons in 1852, in which she advocates the abolition of the death penalty and the political equality of women and Jews. Her extensive correspondence to gather statistical data for her book on the poor caused a sensation. The book was banned by the Prussian censors even before it was published, as Bettina von Arnim was suspected of having helped to instigate the Weavers’ Revolt.

In 1854, Bettina von Arnim suffered a stroke from which she never recovered.
She died on 20 January 1859 surrounded by her family, with the Goethe monument she had designed and made at her side. She was buried next to her husband at the church in Wiepersdorf.

Music played an important role in Bettina von Arnim’s life from an early age: she was already singing in the choir during her time at the Ursuline convent. In Offenbach, she received lessons in piano and music theory from Philipp Carl Hoffmann (1769-1842) and also frequently attended the theatre in Frankfurt. From 1809, she took singing and composition lessons with the Munich Kapellmeister Peter von Winter (1754-1825). She composed songs and duets with piano accompaniment, some works remained unfinished.

Her musical works were published for the first time in 1920, in the fourth volume of the Bettina-von-Arnim-Werkausgabe. However, the editor Max Friedlaender heavily reworked her compositions, both the melodies and the accompaniment.

Bettina von Arnim’s works have only been available in the original text since 1996 thanks to the new edition by Renate Moering at Furore-Verlag; the edition is based on the autographs and first printings.

Source Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bettina_von_Arnim