Bettina (or Bettine) Brentano was a writer, publisher, composer, singer, visual artist, an illustrator, patron of young talent, and a social activist.

Many leading composers of the time, including Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, Robert and Clara Schumann, Franz Liszt, Johanna Kinkel, and Johannes Brahms, admired her spirit and talents.

As a composer, von Arnim's style was unconventional, molding and melding favorite folk melodies and historical themes with innovative harmonies, phrase lengths, and improvisations that became synonymous with the music of the era.

Her grandmother, Sophie von La Roche, was a novelist, and her brother was Clemens Brentano, the great poet known for his lyric poems, libretti, and Singspiele.

After being educated at an Ursulines convent school in Fritzlar from 1794 to 1797, Bettina lived for a while with her grandmother at Offenbach am Main and from 1803 to 1806 with her brother-in-law, Friedrich von Savigny, the famous jurist, at Marburg.

[3] In 1807 at Weimar Bettina made the acquaintance of Goethe, for whom she entertained a significant passion, which the poet did not requite, though he entered into correspondence with her.

[8] Bettina sang briefly in the Berliner Singakademie and composed settings of Hellenistic poems by Amalie von Helvig.

Though domestic duties connected to her 1811 marriage to von Arnim diminished her productivity, several art songs from the period have been recovered and have been published in Werke und Briefe.

She was a muse to the progressives of Prussia, linked to the socialist movement[citation needed] and an advocate for the oppressed Jewish community.

Part of von Arnim's design for a colossal statue of Goethe, executed in marble by the sculptor Carl Johann Steinhäuser (1813–1878), was displayed in the museum at Weimar in 1911.

[2] The chamber opera Bettina by Friedrich Schenker, which was premiered in Berlin in 1987, deals with her friendship to Karoline von Günderrode.