For Einstein, Music "Exists for the Soul"
In Volume 15 of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, two sets of correspondence, the teenage Einstein with Marie Winteler and, thirty years later, the mature Einstein with teenage son Eduard, highlight Einstein's relationship with and lifelong attitude toward music.
As a lovelorn sixteen-year-old, Einstein expresses to Marie in highly romantic and sentimental terms his despair at not being able to make music with her during their separation. He refers to his neglected violin as his "child" which "no longer wants to escape with me from the fumes of ordinary life." He writes that Marie has taken its "soul" away with her. (Vol. 1, 15a.) He later writes to her, "music has so wonderfully united our souls" (Vol. 1, 16g.) Granted, these are the emotional love letters of an adolescent boy, but similar language recurs when he writes as an adult to his son about music.
In January 1926, Einstein writes didactically to his fifteen-year-old son that "music ultimately exists for the soul and not for the intellect" and that he "has little regard for intellectual cleverness in music" (Doc. 184). Eduard does not embrace this binary, either-or approach. He is generally fond of playing the music of the baroque and classical composers favored by his father, but exhibits an intellectual curiosity in his exploration of "more modern composers," such as Reger and Debussy (Doc. 159). There's an interesting passage in Doc. 379 in which the now sixteen-year-old Eduard disagrees with his father's dislike of Arnold Schoenberg and tries to convince him that he should take an interest in Schoenberg's music and theories.
Despite their heated debate during this same period regarding Eduard's professed disregard for the value of intellectual endeavor, in the case of music, Eduard shows himself to have a more forward-thinking and intellectual approach than his father, who limits himself to an emotional and spiritual relationship with music. Perhaps it is necessary for Einstein to think of this favorite pastime as a retreat from intellectual pursuits given the intense nature of his scientific work; for him, music remains purely an escape for the soul.