Reflecting on my childhood essay about Beethoven, suffering
and virtue, I was reminded of a couplet my mother liked to quote:
"Und wo man singt, da lass' dich ruhig nieder,
denn boese Menschen haben keine Lieder."
and began to reflect on the relationship, such as it
might be, between music and goodness. Presumably,
wikipedia.de would have the answer. And it did.

I learned about a poet Johann Gottfried Seume, (1763-1810),
a contemporary of Beethoven's whom I had never heard about.
Here is what wikipedia.de has to say:

Ein weiteres, sehr beruehmtes Zitat, das ihm (Seume)
zugeordnet wird, lautet:

    Wo man singt, da lass' dich ruhig nieder,
    boese Menschen haben keine Lieder.

Hierbei handelt es sich mit einiger Sicherheit
um eine im Volksmund entstandene Abwandlung
einer Strophe seines Gedichtes "Die Gesaenge von 1804":

    Wo man singet, lass dich ruhig nieder,
    Ohne Furcht, was man im Lande glaubt;
    Wo man singet, wird kein Mensch beraubt;
    Boesewichter haben keine Lieder.

(Another, quite famous quotation which is attributed to
Seume, states:
    
   Where people sing, it's safe to rest,
   for evildoers have no songs.

apparently a popular variation of Seume's poem
"Die Gesaenge von 1804".

   Where people sing, it's safe to rest,
   Without concern about the public state,
   Where people sing, no man is robbed,
   For evildoers have no songs.)

That notion, I suspect, would have been congenial to Beethoven,
whose passions and agonies were much concerned with "right and
wrong". Also a sentiment that holds the promise of a new academic
discipline: "The Ethics of Music" but threatens to lead into a
blind alley, when one remembers the atrocious exploitation of
music by the Nazis. Nonetheless, it's worth thinking about, and
asking what facets of Seume's horrendous military experiences
might have made the equation of music and goodness plausible
to him.

A bit more thought about this topic suggests that Seume's thesis
that evildoers do not sing becomes plausible as soon as "evil"
is defined with etymological precision as "unethical" or "immoral",
i.e. as "anti-social", as the refusal - or inability - of the
individual to be integrated into society, e.g. the bank robber.
The circumstance that the bank-robber has no music suggests that
music, song, may be an inherently communal activity. "Now we all
sing together!" Perhaps even the desolate loneliness of the
romantic bard, epitomized, e.g., in the Schubert-Mueller Winterreise
and Schoene Muellerin or in Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte
should be interpreted not as anti-social, but as meta-social,
an expression of the individual's longing for, of his need for
society. When one then considers the personality of Th. Mann's
Tonio Kroeger, the artist as the quintessential outsider and
therefore potential criminal, one suspects the wheel to have
come full circle. Accordingly, music, song, and especially
the great art songs of the 19th century, virtually all of them
songs of isolation and loneliness, may be construed as an
expression of the individual's need and longing for society,
the sublime "whistling in the dark" of the "lost" soul.

The dialectical antithesis of Seume's assertion that evil-doers
do not sing, would assert just the opposite: that music and
song, appealing as they do to the "inner" ears of the musicians
and the hearers, serve to separate the individual from society,
are therefore inherently "unethical" or "immoral", subversive of
the social fabric, and as such constitute the ultimate solvent
of the social continuum, validating Tonio Kroeger's thesis that
the artist is by nature anti-social, that art is a species of
crime. Something to think about.