Dear Werther readers,
Our read-along of The Sorrows of Young Werther begins in two weeks’ time. More details here, including suggestions of which translation you might want to read.
In the meantime, whet your appetite with this brief summary of Goethe’s life.
Goethe is generally considered the greatest author in the German language. He was born in Frankfurt in 1749 and studied law in Leipzig and Strasbourg, where his friend the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder first introduced him to Shakespeare, an event Goethe celebrated as ‘Shakespeare Day’ and which he credited with igniting his love of literature.
In May 1772 he moved to practise law in the small town of Wetzler, where he met Charlotte Buff and her fiancé Johann Christian Kestner. His relationship with the couple during his four months stay inspired his novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which became the first international bestseller and the central work of the German literary movement Sturm und Drang (‘Storm and Stress’), which in turn led to the wider Romantic movement across Europe.
In 1775, following the success of Werther, Goethe was invited to live in the independent duchy of Saxe-Weimar by the Duchess Anna Amalia, mother of the young Duke Charles August and an influential patron of the arts.
Goethe remained there for the rest of his life, as the Duke’s friend and chief adviser and with a wide range of official roles including responsibility for the state mines and highways, the War Commission and the Exchequer.
In 1786, after ten years at Weimar, Goethe made a formative two-year trip around Italy, which he described in his Italian Journey (1816-7). The experience influenced his plays Iphigenie auf Tauris (1789) and Torquato Tasso (1790). The Tischbein portrait above shows Goethe outside Rome.
(The journalist Mark Brown calls this ‘the most famous painting in Germany’ and points out that, if you look closely, Tischbein has given Goethe two left feet and one leg that is disturbingly longer than the other.)
On his return to Weimar, Goethe directed the state theatre, discussed botany with Alexander von Humboldt, mentored the playwright Friedrich Schiller, befriended Ludwig van Beethoven, married his long-standing mistress Christiane Vulpius and worked on scientific theories of anatomy and colour.
He also produced perhaps his greatest works of literature: the novel Elective Affinities (1809), a story of adultery inspired by a chemical reaction, and the two-part closet drama Faust, Part One (1808) and Part Two (1832), known in Germany as Das Drama der Deutschen, ‘the German drama’.
What else should we know about Goethe before reading Werther? Please do share anything that comes to mind as a comment below.
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I highly recommend seeking out Goethe's Theory of Colors!
The songs that Schubert composed to Goethe’s poems are very beautiful: ‘Heidenröslein’, ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, and ‘Erlkönig’ (et al).