Goethe's poetry

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , oil painting by Joseph Karl Stieler

The poetry Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in addition to his dramas , narratives introduce and theoretical writings and describe seems impossible. Much of it has achieved world renown and belongs to the most extensive and important part of the lyrical canon of German literature . From his youth to old age he was a poet and shaped the epochs of Sturm und Drang and Weimar Classics . In the course of about 65 years he wrote more than 3000 poems , some of which appeared independently, some in cycles such as the Roman Elegies , the Sonnet Cycle or the West-Eastern Divan .

This outer circumference is reflected in an astonishing variety of forms and expressions and corresponds to the breadth of the inner experience. In addition to long poems comprising several hundred verses , there are short two-line lines , in addition to verses with high linguistic and metaphorical complexity, simple sayings, in addition to strict and antiquated meters, song-like or mocking stanzas as well as rhymed poems in free rhythms .

With this complete oeuvre, Goethe “actually created the German-language poem” and left behind models by which almost all subsequent poets measured themselves. His imagination is kindled by the smallest and the largest things, goes from the flowers by the wayside to the stars, from the faces of loved ones to ghosts and vampires, celebrates loneliness, guilt and despair, until it finally reaches the calm of old age expresses itself in instructive, often formulaic ideological poems and clarified, symbolic poems.

Development and characteristics

Goethe's work goes through several phases that have been repeatedly illuminated and presented by research.

After Sensitivity , Sturm und Drang , Weimar Classics and Romanticism , which Goethe was critical of, he reached a late phase . The trilogy of passion shows that even in old age he still dealt with problems inherent in his work and thus sought to transcend the individual pain of Ulrike von Levetzow in new ways. The mysticism of old age had numerous roots. In a letter to Zelter he explained why the ancient Persian spiritual world appealed to him: “Absolute surrender to the unfathomable will of God, serene overview of the moving, always circular and spiral-like earth drift, love, inclination floating between two worlds, everything real purified, symbolically dissolving ... "

In comparison to a poet such as Heinrich Heine with the Book of Songs , Goethe's lyrical effectiveness did not begin with a clearly defined prelude. His constant productivity and a protean trait of his nature subjected his work to constant metamorphosis and development, so that it could never be regarded as something closed, stable. Erich Trunz formulated that he was “a creator and a person who changed his mind right up to the end”, a trait that is also evident in the history of the effects and the edition of his poetry, and was encouraged by the “venial grouping” of his poems.

The smooth versatility is joined by the simplicity of the language, which is evident in the poem's opening, which leads directly into the lyrical situation. These include exclamations (“How wonderfully shines / nature shines!”), Imperatives (“Cover your sky ...”), factual or excited reports, intimate addresses, longing wishes or questions such as “Do you know the land where the lemons are bloom? ” or “ What should I hope from seeing you again ...? ” The sudden beginning pulls the reader over the hidden threshold of the poem and confronts him with the personality of the poet.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In his late autobiography Poetry and Truth , Goethe illuminated his development in a self-styling way and embedded this in a network of personal youth experiences - such as the love for Anna Katharina Schönkopf during his Leipzig studies -, anecdotes and the background of contemporary literature such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's dramas . The productive source stands between his own experiences and traditional forms that he was able to develop further until the end of his life. He wanted to transform what "delighted or tormented, or otherwise occupied himself into a picture, a poem". "Everything that became known about me, therefore, are only fragments of a large denomination ..."

In this way, Goethe himself provided the approach for future research: Since the poet's personality is revealed to a greater extent directly in poetry than in his epic or dramatic work, for example, it is usually not a distanced role poetry .

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel confirmed Goethe's assessment in his lectures on aesthetics , which differ from Kant's subject-related criticism of the power of judgment through the clear reference to the work and extend to a definition of the content of the beautiful . In the field of poetry, Hegel assigned Goethe the outstanding position. In the entirety of the lyrical poems "the totality of an individual is shown according to his poetic inner movement. For the lyric poet is forced to express everything that is poetic in his mind and consciousness in the song ... In this regard is special To mention Goethe, who in the diversity of his rich life always behaved poetically. Here, too, he is one of the excellent people. "

After first reading experiences with Shakespeare and Klopstock and a few conventional experiments of his own, it took some catalytic impulses to activate his creative power. In his youth, under the impression of love for “Käthchen”, he had already written some shorter collections such as the book Annette and the Neue Lieder .

storm and stress

In Strasbourg , Goethe met Johann Gottfried Herder , who was to influence him deeply. So he pointed out folk poetry , Shakespeare and Ossian , addressed critical questions and motivated him to develop further as a poet. He was bothered by Goethe's “woodpecker beings” - he would only look into everything without really accessing it. The "reaching out, packing" is precisely the essence of championship.

During this time, Goethe's poems overcame the traditional order, turned his love poetry into nature poetry, the didactic poem into love poetry - a variety of topics (love, nature, religion, art, myth) that do not make it easy to encircle. The Sesenheimer Lieder , in whose soulful and simple language, his passion for Friederike Brion vented, already show one of his most famous works and the beginning of the adventure poetry with Welcome and Farewell .

As the first of the large, free rhythmic hymns of the Sturm und Drang was Wandrers Sturmlied he only 40 years later published and from which he distanced himself. Here, as in the works of the Frankfurt period, which include Prometheus , Mahomets Gesang and Ganymede , the dithyrambic style of Pindar was palpable, the form of which Goethe took over without adhering to the strict requirements.

Like Wandrer's Sturmlied , Prometheus was published without authorization , but was included in Volume 8 of his writings as early as 1789 . The rebellious, provocative character of his most famous hymn was just as easy to recognize as its mythological imagery, which could be transferred to secular authority.

Prometheus bound, his brother Atlas on the left (drinking bowl from Cerveteri , around 560/550 BC, Vatican Museums , Rome)

The enthusiastic Herder spoke of the "flowing out of poetic rage" and believed he heard the "pulse of genius". His emphatic theory of odors seemed to be realized through these works. The youthful strength and self-assertion of Prometheus towards Zeus point to a new image of man among the young bourgeoisie. The belief in genius and the individual, world-creating creative power rejects the traditional aesthetic of rules. The free rhythms were also linked to verses by Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock , who was the first modern poet to use them.

According to David E. Wellbery , Goethe's early texts emphasize the intensity of the moment to be celebrated. You are moving towards the poetic origin and want to use the lyrical movement creatively. In the early hymn An Schwager Kronos, the lyrical I spurs the driver on to gallop faster and more daring along the bumpy path. By addressing the brother-in-law as Kronos , it assigns him, mythologically exaggerated, the role of the god of time and can thus remove himself from everyday life and swing himself up to heaven. The glorious arrival in the underworld at the end of the work alludes to the Homeric Apollo hymn , in which the gods rise from Jupiter's circle to pay their respects to the future victor.

In scenes from other works such as Stella and Egmont , Goethe also hinted at the fact that speed in the age of carriages also depended on the personality of the postilion . Time and speed in particular were important elements of his early self-image. With his impatience, he apologized to his mother for not staying in Frankfurt. The "disproportion" between the "narrow and slow" stagecoach and the "breadth and speed" of his being would have made him "mad."

Movement patterns and the hiking motif also play a role in the early dialogical idyll Der Wanderer . The title character meets a young woman and interrupts her hike to rest in the shade of an elm and later drink at a fountain. The sentimental reflections take up thoughts of eternity from Spinoza's ethics (“The spirit is eternal, provided it understands things from the perspective of eternity”): The encounter with the mother and the “suckling boy” on her breast show the figure the eternal laws the succession of generations and show her - as in his brother- in -law Kronos - the way to the source of her own creative power.

For Wellbery, Goethe was also a “formalist” in his Sturm und Drang phase with the wildly hurled images and scraps of sentences. He recognized internal laws in the seemingly chaotic and did not want to throw all rules and laws overboard. In the introduction to his wallet from 1776 he wrote: "Every shape, even the most felt, has something untrue, but it is once and for all the glass, whereby the sacred rays of the widespread nature will gather to the hearts of the people for a glimpse of fire."

Weimar

In Weimar it initially seemed as if Goethe would continue the first-person portrayal of his experience. Although the genius-oriented life did not change significantly, after 1776 there was no more poetry that clearly corresponds to Sturm und Drang (while Schiller, who was 10 years his junior, was still to write Die Räuber und Kabale und Liebe ).

Snowfall on the Brocken

In addition to the seafaring , only the Harz trip in winter falls into this era. The Harzreise is the last great hymn in free rhythms, which shows an intimate and grateful observation of nature. The closing verses already reveal a certain distance to the wild and creative reference to the self in the preceding hymns. From the perspective of a bird of prey soaring high in the air, the lyrical ego observes the things below and the pain that is mapped out for some. The poem is filled with a religious sound, which is also due to the reading of the Psalms . So he confided in his diary after the adventurous, not harmless ascent of the Brocken : “Early in the morning after the peat house in deep snow ... cheerful, wonderful moment, the whole world in clouds and fog and above everything cheerful. What is the person that you think about. "

As Goethe knew, the vulture was a bird of prophecy among the Romans: "For a god has / each has his path / outlined ..." While the happy seems to reach his goal, the unfortunate in vain struggles against the "barriers of the iron thread" .

The way to the Weimar Classic

In Ilmenau , Goethe had to struggle with practical administrative questions that were not always easy. Here he was also confronted with social issues, one of which was the poverty of the rural population. These elements can be recognized in the poem of the same name, which can be understood as an elegiac farewell to the previous period of genius.

Duke Karl August, around 1805

The long dedication poem to Duke Karl August , written in 1783 and only published in 1815, is considered to be one of Goethe's most important occasional poems . It shows some of his characteristic changes in the transition to Weimar Classicism and corresponds to his own characterization in poetry and truth . Ilmenau also illustrates how Goethe knew how to shape and reflect on his life. By further developing the sphere of self-reflecting hymns, he allows himself to determine and delimit his position in relation to that of the duke.

The work comprises 191 four to six - lobed iambs and can be divided into three sections. Verses 1 to 28 and 156 - 191 show the lyrical I in the Ilmenau valley basin and frame a long middle section that evokes a daydream of a "magical fairy tale land" in which the ghosts of Shakespeare (from his Midsummer Night's Dream, for example ) haunt around. The socio- ethical poem, which is characterized by high sensitivity, aims at self-restraint and renunciation and appeals to the Duke: "Only those who strive to lead others / must be able to do without much."

Increasingly, he stylized his experience, subjected it to greater control and began to represent the many topics anew. It remains astonishing how the respective external form did not become a fetter and how his poetry remained in balance even in the course of its classical purification and avoided rigid regularity as well as arbitrary rhythm. Often verse and prose come close, as can be seen in the early version of Iphigenia . With a new hynmik, he dampened the intensity of the feeling of the first phase and poured it into new forms. Wanderer's night song and the song of the spirits over the waters (1779), Frontiers of Humanity (1781) and The Divine (1783) are characteristic examples of this. In them Goethe aimed at the relaxation of language in verse and sound.

The nature is becoming increasingly important for him philosophical questions arise and looking for design. The solemn punch in the attribution stands at the beginning of the Faust . In addition to the rich rhyme and sound arrangement, ballads soon appeared which offered him both lyrical and dramatic possibilities and - like Der Fischer und Erlkönig - are among his most famous works.

Weimar Classic

overview

The classical era is considered to be the heyday of German literature. Its beginning is often linked with Goethe's trip to Italy in 1786, its end with Schiller's death in 1805. The first and second part of his later trip to Italy were in 1816/17 with the motto I too in Arcadia! published. It was not fully published until 1829.

Eckermann reports that Goethe's “poetic talent” in Weimar was “in conflict with reality” and was hindered by his external position. In 1824 he complained: "Had I been able to live more in solitude, I would have been happier and would have done far more as a poet."

Goethe in the Campagna , by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein

Since the circumstances increasingly depressed him, he set off on the almost rushed trip; not in order to “deceive yourself”, but “to get to know yourself through the objects.” Almost overloaded with art impressions, he left Rome and reached Naples in order to initially only enjoy nature, “the only book that is on every page has great salary ”until he thought about“ botanical objects ”while walking on the beach, which he entrusted to the diary and mentioned the ancient plant that was to continue to accompany him.

While his Italian journey speaks of a “tender relationship” with a “beautiful Milanese woman”, his first cycle of poems, the Roman elegies that followed in 1788, painted the idyll of love and sang his beloved Faustine , a fictional widow, with sensual and erotic attention to detail , so that some contemporaries reacted with distraught. After his return by the end of the century, he gave up free rhythms and restricted his song forms to sociable songs . He continued to write epigrams and was inspired by Schiller, as in his ballads.

Features and idiosyncrasies

In the years after the Roman Elegies and Venetian Epigrams , Goethe initially wrote only a few poems, mostly occasional works or verses in the bibliography that were not published. In addition to the disappointment with the course of the second trip to Italy, with which he had not been able to follow up on the first - "This is no longer Italy that I left with pain" - the old circle of friends and the malice about his relationship with Christiane led to dismissive reactions Vulpius to let the lyric production almost dry up. The epigrams show how critical and negative he reacted to the French Revolution, the consequences of which he also had to do in Weimar.

He received new ideas and impulses from the highly esteemed, ten years younger Schiller and the intensive collaboration with him that began in 1794, in whose journal Die Horen he published poems. The end of the Jacobin reign of terror and the peace of Basel , after which a longer period of relative calm also resulted for Weimar, were further factors that promoted his lyrical production and led to the high points of his work. He was now able to build on his experiences in Italy and turn to a topic that would determine his poetry - antiquity.

This affection is shown formally in the meters of the hexameter and the distich , whose tradition he had learned in Italy and with which he wanted to integrate the erotic idyll into the modern world. Although the love encounter enabled him to get closer to the Roman world, distance was again necessary for the stylized design. On the one hand, there was an erotic unity in the amalgamation of love, and the renunciation in order to poetically form the "quiet enjoyment of contemplation" other.

His attitude towards life could be easily combined with the form of the elegy, which, compared to the song, has a character that looks at the situation. In contrast to Klopstock, Goethe did not try to reproduce the ancient oden measures and thus differed from Friedrich Hölderlin and Johann Heinrich Voss , who had published a translation of the Odyssey in 1781 . August Wilhelm Schlegel pointed out rhythmic inconsistencies to Goethe and helped him correct the elegies, which was unusual for Goethe, as he seldom gave up his works before publication in order not to be confused. He also used the elegiac meter of the distich for numerous other poems that were composed during this period, including the complex and long work Alexis and Dora , which depicts the monologue of a man who has just left his lover and is taking the ship into the distance pulls. Even with Eyphrosyne , the dead tribute to Christiane Becker , Hermann and Dorothea , as a prelude poem for the eponymous epic designed Amyntas and The Metamorphosis of Plants is it's elegies. To his friend Karl Ludwig von Knebel he referred to the tradition of ancient didactic poetry. Inspired by the doctrinal poem De rerum natura of the Roman poet Lucretius , he painted the genesis of plants from seed to blossom and presented a lyrical concentrate of his botanical writing attempt to explain the metamorphosis of plants . By not limiting the concept of metamorphosis to flora and fauna , but transferring it to people and the development of love, the poem presents a classic guiding principle of Goethe - the unity of poetry and natural science .

Reiner Wild sees Goethe's classical poetry as part of a “project classic” with which he reacted to “profound experiences of crises at the end of the 18th century”. This applies to personal questions as well as political developments in the wake of the French Revolution. The reference point of antiquity, which is essential for the Weimar Classic, is a counter-model to which Goethe reacted from a distance with his modern perception of poetry. In his significant works he succeeded in aesthetically reconciling the feelings of alienation and separation associated with modernity for the last time .

Retirement works

symbolism

In Goethe's late poetry, an increasingly dense symbolism emerges, which began with the divan and characterizes what is often called his age style . In his advanced years, Goethe tended towards a mystical and internalized view of the world. He imagined the variety of appearances as something whole, which is preserved through change. The outwardly chaotic world events proceed in the same, legal manner and repeat themselves - however, they are not only circular , but also spiral- like ascending developments. All phenomena represent secret blueprints, which the viewer can recognize in the type and original phenomenon without, however, penetrating further into depth. In this holistic and pantheistic way of thinking, everything - from rocks to plants, animals to humans - has an assigned place. The cause of all, the ground of being, can be called God or Divine. The very narrow boundaries of what can be known by Goethe leave behind unexplored areas that can be revered but not completely deciphered.

Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, Self-Portrait Bridgeman Art Library , London

Goethe valued the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus , according to which the one manifested itself in the sensible world. For him, being is subject to constant change determined by polar forces, the Panta rhei Heraclitus . So it goes in his poem One and All : "And to recreate the created, / So that it does not arm itself to stare, / Eternal living activity works ..." "The eternal moves in all, / Because everything must fall into nothing if it wants to persist in being. ”In the legacy that was written later , he made it clear that what was so“ disintegrated ”also remains in being:“ No being can disintegrate into nothing / Ew'ge moves forward in everyone / In being keep yourself happy! "

Based on respect for the limits of knowledge, his criticism began with romanticism, which he did not reject entirely, but questioned its exuberance and tendency to get lost in the fantastic. The system of thought shaped the special, albeit elusive, symbolic style of late poetry. In the maxims and reflections he writes: "The symbolism transforms the appearance into an idea, the idea into an image, and in such a way that the idea in the image always remains infinitely effective and inaccessible and, even when pronounced in all languages, remains inexpressible."

The symbol style can be seen in the mildly subdued collection of Wilhelm Tischbein's Idyllen from 1822, which comprises 20 poems with an introduction and an end. It is based on pictures by Wilhelm Tischbein , which he had sent Goethe in the form of water-colored sketches in the sun in 1821 and which he had combined with the request to write poems about them. Goethe looked at landscapes, people, gods of nature, families with children, animals and fruits in Arcadian surroundings.

The fourth poem was based on a picture of a large oak tree that stood on an island in the middle of a forest lake.

The poem reads:

In the middle of the water level
the oak rose,
majestic prince's
seal Such green forest flora;
Sees herself at her feet,
gazes at the sky in the flood:
So enjoying life's
loneliness is the greatest good.

The tree here is a symbol of solitary size, which unfolds and rises up to the light in order to surpass itself and to reach the highest. A centaur in another picture is a symbol of restrained power.

With the Chinese-German (n) seasons and times of day , which were published in the Berlin Muses Almanac in 1830 and which seemed strangely alien next to the romantic poems of the other authors, the elderly Goethe turned once more to the east.

He transferred some Movives from Chinese poetry and novels - mandarins , peacocks , willows - into a peculiar poetry and thus created his last lyric cycle. Although the title gives a clear indication, apart from the elements mentioned, genuinely Chinese can only be found in passing. Goethe concentrated on a nature motif, a landscape or a mood. With often idiosyncratic syntax, he condensed the language, but increased its expressiveness.

Twilight colors

Like the Goethe admirer Stefan George later in the year of the soul , he included the seasons , but did not complete the whole circle with spring, summer and autumn.

In contrast to his earlier nature poetry, he reflects outer nature and inner soul landscape less often, as the lyrical ego holds back anyway or, as in the central eighth poem Dämmrung descended from above , now expresses it more cautiously.

Standing between summer and autumn, the poem has a special position in the cycle: It is not assigned to a year but to a time of day , the evening. Rhythmically it breaks new ground by contrasting the iambic poems with a falling , four- winged trochee, which in the first verse tries to trace the sinking twilight by moving downwards. With indirect magic, the moonlight, unlike the glaring sunlight, penetrates the self and “sneaks” into the heart, where it changes to a gentle coolness. Optical impression and haptic perception merge synaesthetically , as in some of Eichendorff's poems . The poem reads:

Dawn descended from above,
Already all proximity is far away;
But first,
Holden Lichts lifted up the evening star!
Everything sways into the unknown,
fog creeps into the heights; The lake is at rest, reflecting
blackened eclipses
.

Now in the eastern area
I suspect the glow and glow of the moon,
slender willow branches of hair
joking on the next tide.
Through moving shadow plays,
Luna's magic light trembles,
And through the eyes the coolness
creeps soothingly into the heart.

The moon, which with its changing phases has been associated with the motif of change since antiquity, enchants the personified natural landscape (joking “twigs of hair” of the willows). The colors fade and merge into an unrealized chiaroscuro. The poem marks a transition from the world of emotion to contemplation , from passion to spiritualization. This serene mood also captures the following verses of the darkening season, whose renunciation gesture corresponds to the emotional distance of the late Goethe.

Philosophical poems

In his ideological poems, Goethe usually formulated briefly instructive religious and philosophical views such as memorable maxims of life and used motifs and concepts that can also be found in other old works in which the earthly appears as a symbol of a higher reality. The eye, for example, can only see the color and not the primordial light and can only enjoy the reflection from a distant sphere. At the beginning of the second part of the drama , Faust, who has just awakened, looks into the sun and has to turn away, blinded, but recognizes the waterfall glittering in the sunlight and confesses: “We have life in the colored reflection.” Goethe used the for things that point beyond themselves Term "parable"; so at the end of the tragedy with the words of the Chorus Mysticus: "Everything that is transient is only a parable". This is the meaning of the word in the second stanza of the poem Prooemion .

In connection with Goethe's search for morphological laws of life, which he believed he recognized ideally in the primordial plant , there is also his short cycle Urworte. Orphic , in which he circled five forces of existence and put love at the center. The work is under the influence of the Danish archaeologist Georg Zoëga , who dealt with the Saturnalia of the Roman Neoplatonist Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius in his treatises .

Quirks

In the later work, certain stylistic peculiarities become more noticeable, which do not only concern his poetry and which he himself admitted as an expression of his philosophy of age. These include memorable neologisms such as “black deep eclipses”, “thirst for anger” or “lust for hope”.

He often uses word formations that begin with the word "over" such as "overweight", "overly happy", "over-free", "over-worldly" and "over-fast". This tendency is related to the doubling of adjectives, in which the first is often not declined, for example “Klein, kleine Knabe” from the outline of life at midnight, which he greatly appreciates .

Characteristic of his late poetry, he uses words in several grammatical functions (e.g. as subject and object or predicate) and thus shows a tendency towards cyclicality and coexistence, which he also appreciates in other contexts. The conversations of German emigrants already showed his love for parallel stories, which is now becoming increasingly clear stylistically. The ugliness, which replaces strict co-ordination and hierarchy, is also evident in the loose syntax , again in the poem At Midnight with its incomplete, open sentences and unusual word positions, in Wenn am Tag Zenit und Ferne , which was built fifty years ago and in his "Poetic Testament" legacy with an anacoluth. These peculiarities are joined by the simplicity of the language and sometimes drastic laconicity.

Goethe and Schiller

Experience and thought poetry

Friedrich Schiller portrayed by Ludovike Simanowiz in 1794

For Goethe, antiquity became part of his spiritual self-image. While during the Sturm und Drang period he celebrated the abundance and naturalness of Greek life in his hymns, starting with Wandrer's Sturmlied , he now increasingly explored its peculiarities and also perceived the distance to the ancient world. In his later phase, Greece, which he never entered, appears to him as a unique educational experience and as a space in which human abilities and talents were harmoniously developed.

In contrast to Friedrich Schiller (and Hölderlin ), Goethe did not draw any historical-philosophical consequences from his considerations . Since the ancient ideal was also realized for him in Raphael and Shakespeare , it was less a matter of the difference between old and new than of the respective artist, who could still be “Greek” in his time.

Schiller wanted to "destroy the material through the form" and developed his lyrical style and his poetological insights not only in the study of the critique of judgment , but also in controversies with Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the constant confrontation with the antipode Goethe, whose naive style will his own , sentimental faced. He equated the difference between ancient and modern poetry with that between naive and sentimental . The contemporary cultured man lives for him in artificial conditions. “When he walks in the open air, when he lives in the country or when he lingers a lot at the monuments of the old days”, he sees nature “as a contrast to the artificial environment.” He lacks the ideal - unity with himself. With his Schiller also referred to questions of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes . Modern literature should no longer imitate nature, but represent ideas. Last but not least, this theoretical basis is a reason for the frequent (against Schiller) opposition between his poetry of thought and Goethe's poetry of experience , a construct that goes back to Wilhelm Dilthey and has increasingly lost its importance.

In his last major aesthetic essay, On Naive and Sentimental Poetry , Schiller developed a philosophy of history and distinguished between reflective and sentimental poetry from natural and naive poetry. For him, Goethe was the epitome of the naive poet. In the long treatise, Schiller also distinguished himself from Jean-Jacques Rousseau : the path of the artist is the same as that which man should fundamentally take. According to Schiller, man cannot develop otherwise than by cultivating himself and thus leaving “the state of the natural man” behind. For him it is trivial to devalue modern art compared to old art. “Naive poets” like Homer are no longer in their place in this artificial age. In the “state of natural simplicity”, in which the human being acts as “harmonious unity”, imitation of the real characterizes the naive poet, while the sentimental in the “state of culture” represents the ideal. For Schiller, the sublime was the goal of the new and sentimental poets, while the beautiful was that of the naive.

Symbol and allegory

If the poetry of Goethe is compared with that of Schiller, the verdict is mostly to the disadvantage of the younger poet. On the one hand you can see the naturalness and simple beauty of Goethe's language, on the other hand the intellect and the tense will to pour philosophical principles and social demands into verse. The rhetorical gift Schiller, which gives the characteristic value of his plays and prose works, tends in poetry sometimes the phrases-like and disturbed by cliches and platitudes. The derogatory contrast created in the concept of experiential poetry can also be found in Friedrich Nietzsche and Theodor W. Adorno , for whom Goethe, alongside Mozart and Beethoven, was the outstanding representative of classicism in the age of bourgeois emancipation. Schiller did nothing more than paraphrase Kant; The petty bourgeois pretends to be in his pretentious sentences and stilted demands. No serious literary historian would place Schiller next to Goethe, while it happens again and again to mention the agreeable Handel with Bach in the same breath.

Hegel also compared the poetry of Goethe and Schiller, but came to a more differentiated result and a milder judgment than many later critics, in that he spoke out against disparaging Schiller compared to Goethe. For him, too, the "intentionality of abstract reflections and even the interest in the philosophical concept [...] was noticeable in some of his poems"; however, it is unreasonable to play off his verses "against Goethe's unchallenged and unclouded impartiality". Schiller's great achievement consists in overcoming the Kantian subjectivity and abstraction of thinking and trying to think beyond them to grasp and shape reconciliation as the true. While Schiller immersed himself in the depths of the spirit, Goethe was on the trail of the natural sides of art and concentrated on plants and animals, crystals, clouds and colors.

Immanuel Kant, 1791 after the Berlin painter Gottlieb Doebler

According to Peter-André Alt , it would be fatal to maintain the usual “canon-building orientation towards the poetry of Goethe” with regard to Schiller. He admits that some of Schiller's poems seem strange or even embarrassing to today's reader and, with the song of the bell, refers to what is probably the most grateful example for mockers, but sees the reason not in the lack of poetic substance, but in Schiller's inclination, To formulate "banal-sounding" truths based on bourgeois living standards. Goethe always appears as a fixed star when nothing more is seen in Schiller's poetic development than a path to Goethe's pictorial language. In order to get to the essence of his poetry and to recognize its quality even in relation to Goethe, one should not overlook the poetic meaning of allegory and the relationship between image and concept. Schiller illustrated the abstract by first ascertaining the possibilities of human reason, a path that one could appreciate as a critical achievement in Kant's sense .

In his foreword to the first volume of his correspondence with Schiller, written in 1825, Goethe discussed the “delicate difference” with his friend and also explained the relationship between intuition and abstraction . He turned against Schiller's allegorical method, which he opposed his symbolic conception of poetry. There is a “big difference whether the poet seeks the particular in relation to the general or looks in the particular at the general. This kind of allegory arises where the particular is considered an example […] of the general, but the latter is actually the nature of poetry, it expresses a particular without thinking of the general or referring to it. ”Goethe played many with these words Years after Schiller's death, he responded to a dispute in the late summer of 1797, which threw a clear, almost glaring light on the differences between the two. When he visited his mother in Frankfurt on a trip to Switzerland and watched the hustle and bustle of the Hauptwache from the window of his apartment, he noticed that some “objects” put him in a “poetic mood”. He declared that it was not the powers of imagination but the things themselves that evoke feelings because they “stand as representatives of many others, include a certain totality [...] and so from the outside as from the inside claim a certain unity and allness When he informed Schiller of this valuable, “happy discovery”, and Schiller reacted extremely laconically, he was initially disappointed. On 7./8. On September 1st, Schiller had qualified the symbolic character (of Goethe's poetry) not as a natural property of the thing, but as the result of fantasy and sentimental imagination. If the object is empty and poetically meaningless, the human imagination will have to try it. It was not the appearances that were important to Schiller, but the respective modes of perception, which have their own aesthetic value.

The root of Goethe's symbolism is his assumption that natural phenomena are (ideal and general) "deeply significant." The elegies of the 1790s such as Alexis and Dora and The Metamorphosis of Plants , which demonstrate that empirical things can be pictorial, testify to this belief perceptual structure of meaning is inherent. While the sublime perception of the human eye Goethe grasps the symbol in its deeper meaning, Schiller first has to design the allegory in order to be able to ascribe an intelligible meaning to the appearances. Goethe's natural philosophy thus essentially contradicts Schiller's concept of allegory.

music

Settings and composers

Franz Schubert portrait by Wilhelm August Rieder , 1875, after a watercolor from 1825

No German poet had such a far-reaching effect on contemporary and later composers as Goethe, with whom a new era in the history of song began. In addition to the dramas, libretti and cantatas , it was and is above all the poems and songs from novels and other works that have been set to music in a vast number.

Gero von Wilpert speaks of around 2000 composers of various grades who were inspired by Goethe. Of these, Johann Friedrich Reichardt 146, Carl Friedrich Zelter 92, Franz Schubert 64, Carl Loewe 60, Hugo Wolf 58, Robert Schumann 44, Ludwig van Beethoven 23 and Johannes Brahms 19 left vocal works .

There are numerous studies on the theoretical relationship of the eye-man Goethe to music. He came from a very musical family - his mother played the piano, his father the lute, his sister Cornelia Schlosser sang - and received piano lessons from Johann Andreas Bismann. Although he learned the cello a little later in Strasbourg from the teacher Basch, his own instrumental playing was ultimately not very developed. He was able to read sheet music well in order to get an initial idea of ​​the compositions and was advised by musicians on theoretical and compositional questions. Many of his poems he wrote with the intention of later setting, took theater seals and musical comedies (such as purple ), to the musical environment and gave direct instructions composers.

The fact that Goethe was rather reserved or alienated towards important contemporaries such as Franz Schubert and Ludwig van Beethoven is also due to the influence of conservative song composers, including Philipp Christoph Kayser , Reichardt and, above all, his good old friend Zelter, who strongly criticized Beethoven. In contrast to Zelter, Goethe felt aloof respect for Beethoven, whom he characterized as a “completely untamed personality” and met him two years after the premiere of the Egmont drama in 1812 in Teplitz.

Zelter

When Goethe Zelter setting of I think of you from Friederike Brun heard the music spoke to him immediately and motivated him to contrafactum of the model, as close to the lover was more than eighty times dubbed so by Beethoven as a song with six variations for piano four hands . In a letter to Friederike Helene Unger , he described the profound effect his music had on him. In the following years he further developed the connection with Zelter, who soon received the ballad Der Gott und die Bajadere and the song An Mignon published in Schiller's Musenalmanach and set both works to music. In a letter to Schiller dated November 25, 1797, Goethe praised the setting of the ballads, which seemed valuable and original to him.

Goethe developed some very specific music-aesthetic positions and later devised his own, if fragmentary, tonal theory . He was intensely preoccupied with the spiritual connection between music and poetry, one reason why he was expanding his contact with Zelter. Goethe insisted that the composer heed the poet's intentions and put his own motivational ingenuity aside. Zelter met these demands and even surpassed the established song composer Reichardt. Compared with August Wilhelm Schlegel said Goethe: "Just this connection Zweyer arts is important and I have many things about Beyde in the sense that could be developed only by dealing with such a man. As far as I can judge, the original of his compositions is never an idea, it is a radical reproduction of the poetic intentions. "

Music and poetry

Presumably, without natural musicality, Goethe would not have been able to write so many verses or libretti specifically intended for setting to music and to give his poems the rhythmic and melodic linguistic sound that is part of the essence of his poetry and that has given it its high status. His poetry, "to a large extent linguistic music", influenced the times precisely through its new tone of voice, overcoming the boundary between pure lyric poetry and simple lyrics.

Joseph Kiermeier-Debrein believes that it was only after his painful, one-sided love for Ulrike von Levetzow that Goethe experienced music as what it always meant to Jean Paul : an elegiac mood in the world from which it can simultaneously release . When he met the pianist Maria Szymanowska and the singer Anna Milder-Hauptmann , still in gloomy shape, his faith in the music deepened, which for him became the fate of the romantic artist. Ironically, in the poetry of the eye man, the contradiction between the constitution of the world and the possibility of overcoming the valley of woe seemed to have been dialectically overcome - a synthesis that made modern art song possible in the first place.

Marianne Wünsch also wants to work out the importance of music for the elderly Goethe in the final poem of the trilogy of passion entitled Reconciliation , but comes to a different conclusion. After the gloomy end of the elegiac love lament of the second poem "The universe is mine, I am lost to myself ... They separate me and destroy me." Now, with "angel wings", the "millions" of interwoven tones float and fill people with eternal "beauty". The heart is relieved and notices, “That it is still alive and beating and would like to beat…” Goethe introduces the music in the present tense (“there floats out”) and lets it fade away in the last sentence in the past tense (“Da felt - oh that it would remain forever! - the double happiness of tones and love. ”) The reconciliation achieved in this way, however, only has a numbing, pain-relieving character, and in the end the music is entrusted with a task that literature was still able to take on in Tasso . If it was the god of language there who made the relief possible (“... a god gave me to say what I suffer ...”), this otherwise precise and promising instrument now fails. While meaning and the fulfillment of existence were still possible in the lyrics of Sturm und Drang and the classical period with the Roman elegies , now only music remains. But it works on a psychological and not a spiritual-ideological level, so that a dialectical reconciliation was denied Goethe and his age .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bernd Witte: Poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. (= Universal Library. 17504: Study of Literature: Interpretations). Reclam, Stuttgart 2005, p. 5.
  2. ↑ For example Bernd Witte: Poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. (= Universal Library. 17504: Study of Literature: Interpretations). Reclam, Stuttgart 2005, p. 5.
  3. ↑ On this: Marianne Wünsch: Signs - Meaning - Sense, On the Problems of the Late Poetry of Goethe using the example of the "Trilogy of Passions". In: Bernd Hamacher, Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth (ed.): Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Poetry and Drama. New ways of research. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2007, pp. 130–145.
  4. ↑ Quoted from Erich Trunz : Notes. In: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Poem and epics I. (= Goethe's works, Hamburg edition. Volume IX). CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 679.
  5. ↑ Quoted from: Joseph Kiermeier-Debrein: Goethe. "The lyric work". In: Kindlers New Literature Lexicon. Volume 6, Munich, 1989, p. 433.
  6. ↑ Quoted from: Terence James Reed : Goethe als Lyriker In: Bernd Witte (Ed.): Goethe-Handbuch. Volume 1: Poems. Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, p. 2
  7. ↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Autobiographical writings, From my life, poetry and truth. (= Goethe's works, Hamburg edition. Volume IX). CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 283.
  8. ↑ Joseph Kiermeier-Debrein: Goethe. "The lyric work". In: Kindlers New Literature Lexicon. Volume 6, Munich, 1989, p. 433.
  9. ↑ Quoted from: Joseph Kiermeier-Debrein: Goethe. "The lyric work". In: Kindlers New Literature Lexicon. Volume 6, Munich, 1989, p. 433.
  10. ^ So Eckhardt Meyer-Krentler: Welcome and farewell - heartbeat and lash. In: Bernd Hamacher, Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth (ed.): Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Poetry and Drama. New ways of research. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2007, p. 34.
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  12. ↑ Inge Wild: Prometheus. In: Poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Reclam, Stuttgart 2005, p. 49.
  13. ↑ Inge Wild: Prometheus. In: Poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Reclam, Stuttgart 2005, p. 52.
  14. ↑ Wertherzeit in Wetzlar. In: Karl Otto Conrady : Goethe, life and work. Patmos, Düsseldorf 2006, p. 173.
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  17. ↑ Quoted from: David E. Wellbery: "Spude dich Kronos", time semantics and poetological conception in the young Goethe. In: Bernd Hamacher, Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth (ed.): Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Poetry and Drama. New ways of research. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2007, p. 78.
  18. ^ David E. Wellbery: "Spude dich Kronos", time semantics and poetological conception in the young Goethe. In: Bernd Hamacher, Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth (ed.): Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Poetry and Drama. New ways of research. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2007, p. 84.
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