Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von

Philip Weller

https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.11358
Published in print: 20 January 2001
Published online: 2001

(b Frankfurt, Aug 28, 1749; d Weimar, March 22, 1832). German poet, dramatist and novelist. One of
the most important literary and cultural figures of his age, he was recognized during his lifetime for his
accomplishments of almost universal breadth. However, it is his literary works that have most
consistently sustained his reputation, and that also serve to demonstrate most clearly his many-faceted
relationship to music.

Goethe studied law in Leipzig and Strasbourg, but after returning to Frankfurt in 1771 he worked as a
newspaper critic. In 1771 he moved to Weimar as a court official and privy councillor.

In 1791, after making two visits to Italy (1786–8, 1790), he became Intendant of the Weimar court
theatre, and he held this post until 1817. His literary works were set to music, chiefly as operas and
lieder, from the 1770s onwards; his views on music, which emanate from observations in novels, letters
and other writings, contribute valuably to the social and cultural history of music and its reception.

Goethe was passionate about musical experience, and he was in contact with practising musicians
fairly regularly for most of his life. His close friendship with the Berlin composer C.F. Zelter produced,
in addition to a quantity of lieder, a voluminous correspondence which included frequent discussion of
musical topics. Zelter introduced his extraordinarily gifted student, Felix Mendelssohn, to the Goethe
household in Weimar in 1821, and the young prodigy stayed there again several times during the
1820s. On these visits he played Goethe's new Streicher piano to him almost daily, and occasionally
performed before an invited audience, covering a keyboard repertory from Bach through Mozart and
Beethoven to recent compositions of his own and giving score-readings of orchestral works by Bach,
Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Weber. Other famous performers whom Goethe heard in Weimar
included Hummel (who was appointed court Kapellmeister in 1819), Henriette Sontag, Clara Wieck,
and, not least, Paganini, whose violin playing, accompanied by Hummel, Goethe compared to a ‘fiery,
cloudy pillar’. He also heard such artists as the soprano Angelica Catalani (at Carlsbad, 1818) and the
pianist Maria Szymanowska (in Weimar and elsewhere, 1822–3), and he was deeply moved by
performances of Anna Milder-Hauptmann (Beethoven's first Leonore), whom he heard in the 1820s.
Goethe's comments on music thus command interest, beyond the insight they offer into his inner
world, as valuable eye-witness reports.

In 1810 Bettina Brentano wrote to Goethe enthusiastically about her meeting with Beethoven in
Vienna. Encouraged by her, on 12 April 1811 Beethoven himself wrote to Goethe about the incidental
music that he had composed the previous year to Goethe's play Egmont (completed 1787). The two
finally met in Teplitz in summer 1812. Goethe described Beethoven's playing as amazing and added
that he was both more energetic and more inward than any other artist he had ever met; he exuded
talent in an astonishing way, but was also strikingly brusque and laconic in his speech and unruly in his
behaviour and social demeanour. These points of contact did not, however, develop into the
relationship that Beethoven, for his part, seems to have desired. One reason was perhaps that, with
increasing age, Goethe apparently became more inclined towards a temperamental ideal of balance, as

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opposed to extreme states of emotional arousal or ‘inspiration’. While he could indeed be profoundly
affected by a performance, he generally avoided overpowering effects. This attitude may also have
been a factor in his failure to respond to the Schubert settings of his poems that were sent to him, with
a covering letter, in 1825; he was by then old and ill, and so perhaps likely to be unreceptive to such
strong characterization. Not only was he extremely protective of the rhythm and colour of the words of
his texts, but he tended to resist any tendency towards dramatic amplification or emotional over-
intensification. It was therefore perhaps inevitable that the opportunity for Goethe and Schubert to
engage with each other would be lost. It is striking, however, that when in 1830 Goethe heard Erlkönig
sung by Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, he was deeply touched. Although he observed that the music
expressed the rhythm of the galloping horse almost too noisily, and that it generated a feeling of
apprehension and dread that was almost too strong, he said to the singer: ‘A thousand thanks for this
wonderful artistic achievement … When I first heard this composition it said nothing to me, but
performed in this way the whole thing becomes an almost tangibly visible picture’.

Goethe's musical taste was also founded on a veneration for both Mozart and J.S. Bach. In the case of
Mozart (whom he heard perform only once, as early as 1763 in Frankfurt) it was above all the mature
operas that interested him, but he also regarded the composer, along with Raphael and Shakespeare,
as a pre-eminent example of an artist endowed with a ‘higher perception’ which informed not only his
creative output but also, to an extent, his very existence. Goethe's interest in Bach was much less
typical of his time, even though Bach had been in Weimar almost within living memory. He sought out a
local musician, J.H.F. Schütz (1779–1828), to play Bach's preludes and fugues and chorale preludes to
him, and he took a vicarious interest, through Zelter, in Mendelssohn's revival of the St Matthew
Passion in Berlin in March 1829.

Despite his musical enthusiasms, Goethe was not a fully literate musician himself, although he could
(mechanically at least) play the piano and had once dabbled in playing the cello. He described what
was probably his own situation in a character in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre: ‘Though he did not
himself have any special talent or aptitude for music and did not play any instrument, he was fully
aware of music's great value, and often sought out this greatest of pleasures that can be compared to
no other for enjoyment’. His perceptions usually needed to be conceptualized and verbally articulated
as a way of making them real to himself as much as to others: ‘I know music more through reflection
than through direct appreciation, thus only in a rather generalized way. … And so it is that I …
transform this unmediated enjoyment into ideas and words. I am aware that one third of life is thereby
inaccessible to me’. He insisted nevertheless that he was a ‘good listener’ (‘Guthörender’), although he
lacked an expert ear (letters to Zelter, 19 June 1805 and 2 May 1820).

Goethe's passion for music of all kinds, but particularly his interest in promoting the cause of German
poetry, found an important outlet in his early espousal of volkstümlich, ‘folk-style’, or verse and the
associated tradition of performance as lieder. (This was acknowledged in the dedication to him by
Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano of the collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn, 1805–8). His first
publication of any kind was the Neue Lieder in Melodien (Leipzing, 1770), a volume of pastoral poems
in musical settings by B.T. Breitkopf, and through his contact with Herder in Strasbourg he developed
his deeper interest in volkstümlichkeit. The poem ‘Heidenröslein’ exemplifies the overlap and
confusion that existed between authentic folk verse and imitations. It first appeared in print as if it
were a folksong text, ‘quoted from memory’ in Herder's Von deutscher Art und Kunst (1773), but
possibly existed in another version before Goethe revised it for a collection of 1789 (see Sternfeld,
1954, pp.120–21). Schubert's setting (D257) appeared in 1815.

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Goethe continued to prefer the older, more restrained lieder of such composers as Zelter, J.F. Reichardt
and J.A.P. Schulz to those in newer styles; as indicated above, he had little appreciation of the greater
musical power of Schubert. His views on song are most extensively detailed in the correspondence
with Zelter, whom he came to know in the later 1790s. Having received a volume of Zelter's songs,
including settings of his poems (Zwölf Lieder am Clavier zu singen, 1796), Goethe wrote to A.W. von
Schlegel on 18 June 1798, expressing his desire to know Zelter:

The link between two such arts [poetry and music] is so crucial, and I already have so much in
mind in relation to both, that it can be properly brought out and developed only through
contact with a man of this sort. The basis and originality of his [approach to] composition, so
far as I can judge, is never simply a musical invention, but a radical re-creation or imitation of
the poetic intentions.

Goethe saw lyric poetry as in some sense incomplete without music, just as written text sought its
fulfilment in sound. As he said in 1794: ‘Certainly, black-and-white [i.e. written or printed words]
should really be banned: epic verse should be declaimed, lyric verse sung and danced, and dramatic
verse delivered by actors speaking in characters’. For him the purpose of the music of the lied was that
it should fuse with the poem and transport it into a different medium and thus into a different
perceptual dimension, while remaining closely anchored – and ultimately subservient – to the rhythmic
and expressive contour of the original verse. The feeling contained in the text could ‘be transmuted or
rather dissolved into the free, untrammelled element of sensory experience’ (letter to Zelter, 21
December 1809).

But changing musical taste quickly overtook Goethe's own preferences. The enduring fascination of his
poems for song composers throughout the 19th century and into the 20th as far as Busoni, Schoeck
and beyond resulted in a long line of compositions of extraordinary stylistic diversity. Arguably,
Goethe's verse acted as a catalyst to the lied just as the poetry of Petrarch did to the 16th-century
madrigal: the world of feeling and imagination unlocked by his poetry was explored and musically
developed in many different directions.

Goethe's poetry was also set chorally. He was an enthusiastic advocate of recreational singing,
especially for male voices, and this tradition is reflected not only in settings by Goethe's
contemporaries and preferred composers but also in works such as Schubert's Gesang der Geister über
den Wassern (D538) of 1817; this was followed in 1821 by a richer, more elaborate setting of the same
text (D714b) more in the manner of a Romantic secular or philosophical hymn (and arguably more in
tune with the conception of Goethe's poem). Schubert's later version has instrumental accompaniment
and there are signal examples of settings of Goethe's poetry for a larger, mixed chorus with orchestra,
some of them epic in scale or monumental in effect, others overtly dramatic in conception (e.g.
Berlioz's La damnation de Faust, based on Gérard de Nerval's translation, Mendelssohn's Die erste
Walpurgisnacht, Liszt's Faust-Symphonie, Schumann's Szenen aus Goethes Faust and Requiem für
Mignon, Brahms's Rinaldo, Alto Rhapsody and Gesang der Parzen, Mahler's Symphony no.8). Several of
these works testify to the great importance for musicians of two of Goethe's literary works in
particular: the novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and the verse drama Faust. The former contains the
characters of Mignon and the Harper, whose songs, embedded within the narrative, were set many

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times over the years, while the latter relates the well-known story of Faust, Gretchen (Marguerite) and
Mephistopheles in Part I, followed in Part II by Goethe's grand allegorical drama of universal history
and final redemption.

Goethe's engagement with the lied was matched by his enduring involvement with opera. In Frankfurt
he experienced opéra-comique and Singspiel and he wrote his own examples in the mid-1770s. This
activity continued in Weimar, where the court, which was interested in both drama and music,
developed a strong tradition of amateur aristocratic as well as professional productions. Goethe's
theatrical interests thus found a receptive environment, and he received stimulus and support from
Duchess Anna Amalia, who was a musician and composer in her own right. In 1776 Goethe invited the
singer-actress Corona Schröter to come to Weimar: she was a major source of inspiration until the
1780s, acting opposite Goethe and taking roles in his Singspiele besides composing music for one
herself (Die Fischerin, 1782; she also composed lieder to his poems). Opera buffa was also staged in
Weimar, but by a mediocre Italian troupe. Goethe's understanding of Italian opera was extended and
deepened during his first Italian journey, when he attended productions in Venice, Rome and
elsewhere. While in Italy he completely revised his two Frankfurt Singspiele, recasting the prose
dialogue as versified recitative and clarifying the plots and characterization in order to bring them
closer to his new-found operatic ideal.

As Intendant of the Weimar Court Theatre, Goethe was active at all levels of preparation and
production. He placed Mozart's mature operas in the centre of the repertory, amid a wide range of
works by both Italian and German composers. In 1824, after he had relinquished his post, he saw
stagings of Weber's Der Freischütz (the success of which in Berlin was reported to him by Zelter) and
Euryanthe (the scenario of which he criticized); he was visited by Weber in July 1825.

With hindsight, it can be seen that Goethe's contribution to opera, for all its local importance, was
historically less decisive and less productive than his contribution to the lied. And this was so despite
his repeated efforts, his wide experience and his extensive knowledge of opera: he found suitable
composers for few if any of his librettos, and several in any case remained as sketches or fragments.
His greatest legacy to music drama was undoubtedly Faust, which as far as he was aware was not set
operatically during his lifetime. This, he accepted with resignation and a profound realization: ‘it is
impossible [that it should now find an effective musical setting]: the horrific, sublime and demonic
moments it necessarily has to embrace from time to time go against the taste of the times. The music
ought to have been in the manner of Don Giovanni; Mozart should have composed Faust’ (conversation
with Eckermann, 12 February 1829). The Polish aristocrat A.H. Radziwiłł composed stage music for
Faust which pleased the poet (and later Chopin): it was frequently used during the 19th century.
Perhaps because Goethe's drama is so grandiose and is so widely known (at least in the German-
speaking world), some later operatic treatments – Busoni's Doktor Faust, for example – went out of
their way to use different sources of the legend or to emphasize different facets of the action. But such
is the power and universality of Goethe's conception that some aspect or another of this great drama
has exerted a formative influence over most subsequent versions of this story.

Writings
Editions: Goethes Gedanken uber Musik: eine Sammlung aus seinen Werken, Briefen,
Gesprächen und Tagebüchern, ed. H. Walwei-Wiegelmann (Frankfurt, 1985)

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Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Zelter in den Jahren 1799 bis 1832, ed. H.-G. Ottenberg and
E. Zehm (Munich, 1991–)

Librettos
Erwin und Elmire, 1st version (Schauspiel mit Gesang), J. André, 1775 (G.J. Vogler, 1781); Lila
(Liederspiel), K.S. von Seckendorff, 1777 (J.F. Reichardt, comp. 1791, ?unperf.); Claudine von
Villa Bella, 1st version (Schauspiel mit Gesang), André, 1778, unperf. (I. Von Beecke, 1780); Das
Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilern (Schönbartspiel), Anna Amalia, 1778; Proserpina
(monodrama), Seckendorff, 1778 (F.C.A. Eberwein, 1814); Jery and Bätely, 1st version (Spl),
Seckendorff, 1780; Die Fischerin (Spl), C.E.W. Schröter, 1782

Scherz, List und Rache (Spl), P.C. Kayser, comp. 1785–6, inc. (P. Winter, 1790; E.T.A. Hoffmann,
1801; M. Bruch, 1858; E. Wellesz, 1928; F. Leinert, 1961); Claudine von Villa Bella, 2nd version
(Spl), Reichardt, 1789 (J.C. Kienlen, 1810; F. Schubert, begun 1815, inc., 1913; F. Gläser, 1826);
Jery und Bätely, 2nd version (Spl), Winter, 1790 (Reichardt, 1801; G.B. Bierey, 1803; C. Kreutzer,
1810; A. Adam, 1834, as Le chalet; H. Zopff, comp. c1870, unperf.; I. Starck, 1873; E. Dressel,
1932); Erwin und Elmire, 2nd version (Spl), Reichardt, 1793; Die Zauberflöte zweiter Teil, inc.

Novels, dramas and ballads set as operas

Die Laune des Verliebten (Schäferspiel, 1767), R. Wagner, comp. 1830, inc., Dressel, 1949; Die
Mitschuldigen (drama, 1769), H. Riethmüller, 1957; Satyros (dramatic satire, 1770), W. von
Baussnern, 1922; P. Bořkovec, 1942, as Satyr; Götz von Berlichingen (drama, 1773), K.
Goldmark, 1902; Clavigo (Trauerspiel, 1774), M. Ettinger, 1926; Die Leiden des jungen Werthers
(novel, 1774), R. Kreutzer, 1792, as Charlotte et Werther, J. Massenet, 1892, as Werther; Faust,
1st version (drama, 1775), I. Walter, 1787, as Doktor Faust; Stella (Schauspiel, 1776), P.-D.
Deshayes, 1791–2, as Zélia and La suite de Zélia, W. Bloch, 1951; Nausikaa (Trauerspiel, 1787),
H. Reutter, 1967; Egmont (tragedy, 1788), G. Salvayre, 1886; Märchen (from Unterhaltungen
deutscher Ausgewanderten, 1795), G. Klebe, 1969, as Das Märchen von der schönen Lilie;
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (novel, 1795–6), A. Thomas, 1866, as Mignon; Die Braut von Korinth
(ballad, 1797), E. Chabrier, 1897, as Briséïs; Der Gott und die Bajadere (ballad, 1797), Ö. Farkas,
1876, as Bajadér; Der Zauberlehrling (ballad, 1797), J. Döbber, 1907

Faust, 2nd version, pt I (verse drama, 1808): C.E. Horn, H.R. Bishop and T.S. Cooke, 1825, as
Faustus; L. Bertin, 1831, as Fausto; H. Berlioz, 1846, as La damnation de Faust; M. Lutz, 1855,
as Faust and Marguerite; C.-F. Gounod, 1859; A. Boito, 1868, as Mefistofele; Hervé, 1869, as Le
petit Faust; H. Zöllner, 1887; C. Kistler, 1905, as Faust 1. Teil; A. Brüggemann, 1910, as
Margherita; F. Busoni, 1925, as Doktor Faust; N.V. Bentzon, 1964, as Faust III

Bibliography
FriedländerDL

GroveO (T. Bauman)

J.W. von Goethe: Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (Tübingen, 1811–22; repr. Berlin,
1970–4, ed. S. Scheibe; Eng. trans, 1824)

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M. Friedlaender, ed.: Gedichte von Goethe in Kompositionen seiner Zeitgenossen (Weimar,
1869–1916) [historical study]

C. Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Goethe und Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (Leipzig, 1871; Eng. trans.
with addns by M.E. von Glehn, 1872, 2/1874/R)

W. Bode: Die Tonkunst in Goethes Leben (Berlin, 1912)

M. Friedlaender: ‘Goethe und die Musik’, Jb der Goethe-Gesellschaft, 3 (1916), 277–340

H. Abert: Goethe und die Musik (Stuttgart, 1922)

H. John: Goethe und die Musik (Langensalza, 1928)

R. Rolland: Goethe et Beethoven (Paris, 1930; Eng. trans., 1931)

A. Orel: Goethe als Operndirektor (Bregenz, 1949)

W. Schuh: Goethe-Vertonungen: ein Verzeichnis (Zürich, 1952); enlarged edn in Johann Wolfgang
Goethe: Gedenkausgabe der Werke, ed. E. Beutler, 2 (Zürich, 1953), 663–760

M. Unger: Ein Faustopernplan Beethovens und Goethes (Regensburg, 1952)

F.W. Sternfeld: Goethe and Music: a List of Parodies and Goethe's Relationship to Music
(NewYork, 1954/R) [incl. further bibliography])

J. Müller-Blattau: Goethe und die Meister der Musik (Stuttgart, 1969)

F.W. Sternfeld: ‘Goethe and Beethoven’, GfMKB: Bonn 1970, 587–90

W. Tappolet: Begegnungen mit der Musik in Goethes Leben und Werk (Berne, 1975)

P. Boerner: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1832/1982 (Bonn, 1981; Eng. trans., 1981)

T. Bauman: North German Opera in the Age of Goethe (Cambridge, 1985)

B. Witte and others, eds.: Goethe-Handbuch (Stuttgart, 1996–8) [incl. further bibliography]

J.R. Williams: The Life of Goethe: a Critical Biography (Oxford, 1998)

See also

Musical glasses

Beethoven, Ludwig van, §7: 1809–12

Empfindsamkeit

Enlightenment

Nationalism, §6: Music and German nation-building: the Vormärz phase

Berlioz, Hector, §2: 1821–30

Boito, Arrigo, §2: Librettos

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Busoni, Ferruccio, §2: Works

Gounod, Charles-François, §1: Youth, early career, ambitions in the church

Liszt, Franz, §16: ‘Faust’ Symphony

Mahler, Gustav, §13: Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, ‘Das Lied von der Erde’

Romanticism, §2: Meaning

Spohr, Louis, §1: Life

Hummel, Johann Nepomuk, §3: Weimar

Mendelssohn, Felix, §3: Years of travel and the Grand Tour

Schubert, Franz, §1(iv): Life: The miracle years

Sturm und Drang

Weimar

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