I shall have to begin at the beginning—I have never had any one to teach me music. But oh, if I did know!—And if I ever got hold of an orchestra—how I would make it go!
And in the middle of it the astonished orchestra would see the conductor take wings unto himself and fly off through the roof.
A book that I mean to write some day will be called The Pleasures of Music, and it will sing the joys of being clean and strong, of cold water and the early morning and a free heart. It will show how all the unhappiness of men is that they live in the body and in self, and how the world is to be saved through music, which is not of the body, nor of self—which is free and infinite, swift as the winds, vast as the oceans, endless as time, and happy as whole meadows of flowers! The more who come to partake of it, the better it is; for generous is “Frau Musika,” her heart is made wholly of love.
—And when I have shown all these things, Frau Musika, I shall tell of the golden lands that I have visited upon the wings of thy spirit!—
What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain!
What fields or waves or mountains,
What shapes of sky or plain!
What love of thine own kind, what ignorance of pain!
May 20th.
I live among the poor people and that keeps me humble. There is not much chance for freedom, I hear them say, there are not many who can dwell in the forests. Prove your right to it—prove what you can do—the law is stern. I am not afraid of the challenge; I will prove what I can do.
But I see one here and there with whom the law is not so strict, I think.